


after

by Kaiseriin



Series: home with you [3]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Forehead Kisses, Kissing, Pseudo-Incest, Surprise Kissing, hand-holding because that's always nice, it is WORSE THAN EVER, there are too many explicit tags with the word hand in them im leaving, why are there so many tags for kissing, you all thought the angst and fluff was over, you were wrong
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2021-02-13
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:33:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 64,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26394202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kaiseriin/pseuds/Kaiseriin
Summary: "This time, it was Five who followed me." ◂ [FivexOC] ▸
Relationships: Number Five | The Boy (Umbrella Academy)/Original Female Character(s)
Series: home with you [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1913896
Comments: 79
Kudos: 133





	1. prologue

**Author's Note:**

> hey guys!! how excited i am to tell you guys that i wrote a chapter i am actually happy with lol but it turned out way too long. 
> 
> normally i keep it five chapters max for each section but im breaking that tradition, i think you would all find it way too much for 15,000 words in one chapter. so i'll put in a 'starter' and then the first chapter might be about 10,000 words.
> 
> if you read this starter before i deleted originally, you could skip it if you wanted. i don't want to make you re-read things lol. it will not be going anywhere this time, so take your time with this long-ass chapter. it is rare that i post more than my usual limit of 6000-8000 words per chapter im surprised but i got a lot of words of encouragement that inspired me to sit and brainstorm some ideas. 
> 
> i rewrote the first chapter and kept very little from the original so i hope you all like it. thanks again to Child_of_the_TARDIS and all those who asked for me to repost. 
> 
> i rewatched the first episode of season one for this and remembered how strange it is that five comes back, eats a sandwich and then leaves to do this own thing and the others just...also leave?? no big conversations about their brother coming back after 16 years away, other than that short one in the kitchen. very hargreeves-repressing-things.
> 
> i hope you're all safe and doing well given the stuff going on in the world and let's get to our fix of fluff/angst/more angst/fluff. 
> 
> all the best x

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

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_after: prologue_

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

_There had been rain pattering against the window on the afternoon that Vanya read a poem in ancient Greek and the soft cluck of her tongue against foreign sounds lulled me into half-sleep. The room was stuffy and hot and dark from the mahogany tones of the furniture which loomed menacingly around us. Sappho spoke through Vanya with the words that she had written in her ancient world, interrupted only if our father questioned gender and case and we would stumble over each another in an effort to answer him._

_I had like Sappho; liked the shortness of her poems, liked to fill in those blank spots in the works of hers that had not survived and cropped up in fragments so that her mind to me was pink and bulbous but cut out of shape with little chunks taken away for me to colour in. I liked that she wrote about love. I liked that she did not shy away from it._

_"And the sweat breaks running upon me, fever," Vanya said delicately, "shakes my body, paler I turn than grass is…"_

_Our father watched the movement of her mouth, sounding out the language of long-dead poets, his monocle sparking and wanting her to trip and smudge a word so it could finally gut her with its silver talon. Sappho spoke through Vanya, though. She finished her endings beautifully. She paused at the points in the poem when Sappho sloped off into commas and dashes and then continued._

_"I can feel that I have been changed," she said. "I feel that death has come near me."_

_Turning the page, she prepared herself for the next short poem that Sappho had written, another half-poem pulled together with the bones of what had once been long and winding but had then been lost in time. I glanced at Vanya and the dull eggshell-coloured face of the clock which loomed behind her. I tried not to slouch in my seat but I liked to imagine Sappho on a fountain with her friends, poised at its edge with one foot brushing against the dust, watching the world as only her eyes could._

_I lost myself in this fantasy of her, though I had seen mere stone busts of her and painted the colour of her skin with my mind, flushed her in rosy pinkness to warm her cheeks and left her in sandals._

_I could have laughed at myself for the caricature that I had made. But still I asked myself if Sappho would have written her poems had she known that someday their full verses would be lost to the world, recalled only in halves?_

_The clock chimed. Our lesson had ended. Worn poetry books were slammed shut, the legs of chairs scraped against the wooden floorboards. We stood with rigid spines for our father to examine our uniforms. Allison had carefully painted Klaus' nails black the night beforehand and already the edges faded into chipped splotches. If we read poems about rebels against corrupt regimes, I imagined Klaus. I imagined him for martyrs and catalysts and revolutionaries._

_Our mother stood in the doorway. "Mealtime, children," she called, her hands smoothing down the creases in her apron, creases that were not there and never had been. Perhaps she had seen it somewhere, women in fresh aprons like hers smoothing them down or perhaps our father had programmed her circuity to smooth down worn creases where none existed._

_"Number Eight," our father said._

_Having already stepped into the hall, balanced on its threshold, his voice curled my tongue against my teeth and made me curse myself. Our father did not need to say more than Number Eight because his tone implied that I should remain still and separate to the others and I did, the soles of my shoes growing roots that went between the tiles, great thick winding roots which hit the core of the earth but did not shrivel up in the heat._

_Stood not three steps ahead of me but obscured by the wall so that our father could not see him, Five looked at me and mouthed, what did you do?_

_Perhaps I had been caught in a daydream. He had likely noticed my blank expression – the tiny monocle had noticed it and whispered it to him – or he had seen my elbows propped on the table momentarily before I had realised that elbows were not allowed on tables. He had used his monocle to peer inside my mind and it had turned him red with anger, because I had not been focused on dissecting cases and gender, but rather on imagining cartoonish Sappho lounging with her friends, writing her poems for Vanya Hargreeves to read aloud hundreds upon hundreds of years later._

_I sloped back into the room and stood behind the chair which had been designated as mine. I had never sat in another chair in that room because this chair was mine and the one beside it belonged to Vanya and it went in a circle, its final round based on our father at its top. Stood behind his own chair, the length of the table between us seemed to yawn wider and wider. He was not watching me but rather the beetles in his cabinet, their shells glinting in the yellow light of the room._

_"You shall accompany me for a short walk," he said._

_I could not ask him anything more; where are we going, why are you taking me, why not one of the others?_

_"You do understand the concept of a short walk, Number Eight," he added, tilting his chin downward, his lids drooping to shroud his knowing eyes._

_ You **do** understand the concept of a short walk. _

_He meant boots and a raincoat, neither of which I wore then. I rushed into the hall and reached for my black raincoat which was stitched with our emblem on its left breast. I slipped off my shoes and tugged on some boots that were lined right after the pair that belonged to Vanya. Then I saw a shadow in the yellow paleness down the hall. Number Five had snuck away from mealtime to eavesdrop, but his silhouette melted back into the other room when our father strode behind me, tucking a scarf around his neck._

_Our mother had stepped into the spot where Five had been, her hands clasped together. She wore a smile which strained at its edges. "Sir, are you taking Astrid out?"_

_"I do not see how it concerns you," he answered._

_Her smile never dropped. "Astrid, remember to button your coat right to the top, honey."_

_I buttoned from the bottom but was not quick enough for her because she dashed forward and reached for the glinting silver button nearest to my collar. Dad blocked her, stepping between my mother and me, slapping her hands away._

_"For God's sake, woman, the child can handle buttoning her own coat."_

_His words were harsh and emphasised with spittle. Mom straightened out and still was she was smiling, always smiling. She nodded and clasped her hands together again._

_"Of course," she said pleasantly._

_He did not offer his hand to me like she had always done on little walks together. He walked as if I was unattached to him, just another child who had mistaken him for her father in a crowd and toddled after him. Luther often walked beside him and Diego perhaps a step or two behind him, but I plodded much further behind than that._

_He opened the door, drew down his hat and stepped out into the rain. I glanced behind to look at my mother but saw that Five had reappeared in the hall, watching from afar. He looked troubled and he had not bothered to hide it behind feigned disinterest and hands stuffed in pockets. He stood with his hands at his sides, his face open and confused._

_"Goodbye, sweetheart," Mom said._

_"Bye, Mom."_

_"Keep your coat buttoned," she said. "It's cold out tonight."_

_"I know."_

_I looked back at her, smiled, and thought, do other wives call their husbands 'sir'?_

▬

_The tall buildings around our house seemed warm and detailed in daylight but at night became marred with lines and shadows that taunted me. I walked with my father – behind him – and wished that we had stayed reading those poems written by Sappho where it was dry and toasty from the crackle of the fireplace spitting its heat at us._

_Instead, my boots clacked against inky puddles and my hands felt purple and blue in my pockets. The rain soaked my cheeks and speckled the low brow of his cap in white misty beads. His monocle was temporarily blind._

_Then the buildings changed and became sparse, hidden behind green corrugated sheets with small gaps that peered into dusty construction sites. We went further. I felt my legs turn numb from the walking but slogged on behind him. In all the blocks that we passed, he had not spoken and would not speak for another while._

_Abrupt and sudden, he turned into a block that led down into what had once been a neighbourhood. I remembered driving through it with my mother, peeking from the backseat at the wires strung between the balconies and the children jumping on chalk hopscotches._

_The wires had been snipped; the rain had washed away the chalk and the children._

_Most windows were smashed and broken, mere shards splintered around the frame. The doors were opened and the black balconies seemed depressed, dipped inward in the middle like the smallest step would buckle them and down they would fall in front of us on the street. I followed him into one of these buildings tucked between all the others and he started up the looming stairwells which were concrete and painted in graffiti and his shoes lashed the stone, echoing upwards, warning the ghosts of our arrival._

_I could not think what he wanted in this place._

_On the wall of each landing was a sign which read the number of floor we had reached – one, two, three – and it went onward and onward until my thighs ached and I felt out of breath but my father strode without me, rounding each stairwell briskly and continuing. It was at the eleventh floor that he jerked his shoulder against a large steel door and we stepped onto the rooftop._

_Instantly I turned to liquid and pooled on the ground with my uniform floating in what I had been, because the ledge of the building smiled at us like my mother had smiled and I was afraid to take another step toward it. I was terrified of heights. I had been the arcade that week and had eaten ice-cream with Ben rather than sit on those rides which rocked right to the tip of the world and thundered back down again to the ground. I felt off-balance, felt like I was tipping before I had even looked down over the ledge._

_"Number Eight," Dad said, "stand here."_

_He pointed at a blank, inconspicuous spot near him. It was not at the ledge but much closer to it than I was already. I pushed my liquid feet forward, sloshing in their boots, mixing with the droplets of rain that filled them and spoiled my socks. I was not sure what my father wanted from this and that was the worst of it._

_"This is a housing project," he said. "And in coming weeks, it will be filled with explosive devices that will detonate and destroy it. It will be rebuilt. It is now a housing project but we shall speak in different tenses for it, soon enough. It was; it has been."_

_The rooftop was wet and slick and looked like the deep end of a swimming pool, sinking lower toward the ledge, like it sloped so that I would slip along its angle and tip over, down and down in a spiral until I hit against the ground in one heavy splatter. It was knowing that we were so high up from the ground, that there was a ledge, there was somewhere from which I could fall which churned my stomach and made my tongue swell and push against the roof of my mouth, disjointing my teeth._

_"Step onto the ledge."_

_It was wide and stone but had no railing around it, nothing that would protect me from a sudden tumble. I hesitated and stared at him with eyes that had become hard pearls in their sockets, lulling this way and that._

_"I can't," I said. "I – I don't want to –…"_

_"Imagine a mission in which you were fighting on a rooftop like this," he said slowly. "And one of your team-mates was thrown over the edge but caught on at the last moment to that ledge. They can only hold onto it for a few seconds. What would you do, Number Eight?"_

_How could he not see my pink blubbering tongue, stuck in my mouth, blocking all sound? How could he not see that I was petrified?_

_"What if it was Number Five who had gotten himself stuck on that ledge and was seconds from falling?"_

_Then it struck me that he could see that I was petrified; he had been looking for it, seeking it out in the pale sweat which strung itself along my forehead and around my flustered mouth which struggled to move and speak._

_"Say he had jumped too many times around the rooftop during the fight," my father continued, "and in that last jump, gotten himself trapped on the ledge. So tired is he that he cannot pull himself up. All the others are preoccupied and only you notice. What would you do, Number Eight? Let him fall? Let him die?"_

_"No," I mumbled. "No, I couldn't – …"_

_"Couldn't what? Save him or let him die? Stand on the ledge."_

_It is Allison who can make us do things without wanting to do them, I thought, not our father. So why are you doing what he asks of you?_

_I had no strength to lift my concrete boots but moved anyway. I felt the familiar dead ache in my thighs from having climbed the stairwells to this point and I wished that they would turn numb again, but I sensed each electric spasm that ran through them because I was so afraid. There was no other way for me to express it than that, in a childish whisper: i'm **afraid**._

_I pressed my palms flat on the ledge and felt the cool damp stone radiate through them, into my bones and into my marrow, shaking it so violently that it turned to pulp._

_"I can't," I said weakly._

_I saw splotches of black and white blobs behind my eyelids, darting back and forth like they did not want me to catch them – like the shadowy monsters I had imagined in my room as a little girl – littler than I was then, on a ledge, overlooking the blank white dust of the construction site below, dotted only in a skip and steel bars._

_"If you fail, we will remain here all night," he said. "We will witness dawn together and we will still wait for you to stand properly on that ledge. Until then, we cannot leave."_

_I propped one boot on the ledge and kept my palms pressed against it, essentially prepared to push myself up but finding my arms were twigs and quickly splintering. I tried once more and thought of Pogo and his warm office and then Number Five, waiting for me._

_I pushed. I felt the ledge shift beneath me but it was my imagination that made it weave and shimmer like a mirage which would melt from underneath me and send me down, down to that blank white dust to give it some colour. I had tumours in my throat. They stuffed my windpipe and all that came out from my mouth was a breathy whistle, shown in white wisps which floated off into the cold lash of rain. I felt the coil of my intestines for the first time, hyper-aware of their rope-like form constricting and loosening. I sensed the movement of blood like a river that ran beneath my skin, washing out those ants._

_But I stood._

_I stood and waited desperately for him to tell me that I could come down._

_"If you were to fall," he said, "I wonder if your astral powers would protect you – possibly wrap around you like a form of armour. Pogo and I have theorised many additional forms that your abilities could adopt under the appropriate conditions."_

_Pogo was unaware that I stood on the ledge of a rooftop. I understood that without having asked it, because he would never allow it, even if my father suggested that it would demonstrate more layers to my powers. But I could not even think to wrap myself in astral energy. If I tried, it would dwindle and fizzle out at my fingertips, having never fully blossomed at all. I could think only of Ben on that pier. You don't have to be embarrassed, he said._

_I was embarrassed, then, on that ledge. I was embarrassed that I had shown my terror in front of my father and that it was something stupid like heights which made me so afraid that I could not bring myself to open my eyes again and look down because I had wrenched them shut and sealed them with tears, hot and searing and pouring down my cheeks in little rivers. I was blubbering like a little kid – I **am** a little kid, I said to myself, and this is not what fathers do._

_"A member of the Umbrella Academy must act swiftly in the face of danger," he boomed. "A pathetic little fear of heights cannot be permitted to endanger the lives of your teammates and therefore it must be conquered!"_

_He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pocket-watch. It was meant to mock me. I knew it like I knew if I wobbled I would fall. He did not count but I heard the ticking of the watch and followed its pattern. It kept me steady. I could open my eyes just a fraction and stare out at the knitted blackness of the sky, its stars blown out by streetlights and skyscrapers and all the things that filled our town with artificial colour._

_The streets were a pattern of neat rows; our house was out there somewhere among them._

_I tipped forward, tipped backward. It was the poor balance in me. It was fright. I could not breathe up there, so high from the ground. I could only take short gasping inhales of air too cold and crisp for my chest to handle. I was not sure how long had passed. The pocket-watch was not counting time for me but rather the hard thumping breaths of my shuddering gasps._

_"Come down, Number Eight."_

_I had to lower myself and hold tight onto the ledge because if I had done it any other way, my legs would not have held me. I had no bones. I had nothing solid in me at all. Organs slopped from side to side in me and I thought if I opened my mouth they would slide right out, I was that badly frightened. I had to walk slowly because I felt at any moment I would faint. I had never fainted before then. But I felt weak and pale and like water._

_He tucked the watch back into his pocket. He righted his cap. He turned and walked into the stairwell, his steps thundering down in an echoing march._

_The moment that he looked away from me, I vomited into the gravel and cut my knees on stone._

▬

_The clock in the hall told me that it was just after midnight when we returned. I slipped off my boots even though I was sure that they had become welded to me from sweat and rain and fear. Mom was sitting dutifully in the only chair in the hall, taken from the kitchen. Perhaps she had been sitting there since the others had gone to bed hours earlier. She sat and sat and only stood when the door opened and I came in, ashen and pale and afraid to look at her because then she would know it and I would crumble like those buildings would in coming weeks. He had plotted explosive devices in my joints and set them off. I was rubble and debris in that hall._

_Off my father strode to his study without another word to me, without telling my mother what had happened or what had made us so late to the house._

_She unbuttoned my coat because he was not around to tell her that I could do it myself and she did not have to call him sir. She smoothed down my frazzled blonde hair. There was no difference in the coldness of her hands on my cheeks when already my skin was cold from the rain. She took me upstairs and peeled off the clothes and let me shower, towelling me down with one of the good towels made from soft Egyptian cotton and coloured beige._

_She brought me into my bedroom and tucked me in like she had done every night for years. I lay very still and she did not read to me because it was too late for stories. She kissed me on the forehead and turned off my light. In the doorway, she said, "I'm glad you kept your coat buttoned all the way to the top, sweetheart. I bet it was cold out tonight."_

_"It was," I answered weakly. "Very cold."_

_"I sure felt it." She said it kindly when both of us knew that she could not feel it. "Goodnight, Astrid."_

_"Goodnight."_

▬

_Once the door closed and her footsteps faded, my bedroom bloomed in a shock of blue light and Five lay down beside me. He said nothing and did nothing other than look at me in the dark. I started telling him what happened in a hoarse whisper because my throat was still full of lumps that gobbled up words before they could flee the dryness. It was implied that this had been some sort of lesson but I felt it had not shown me anything other than my own shame that something like towering heights could make me weep and sniffle._

_Five listened and said nothing at the end. But then he nodded and it seemed he had come to a kind of conclusion in his own mind._

_"We could run away."_

_I scoffed. "What?"_

_"I mean it." He shifted to look into my eyes. "Klaus talks about it all the time – leaving this place and doing his own thing someday. He says he'll find a circus to join or become one of those mediums who rips people off on those channels that only run at three in the morning. Well, why can't we?"_

_"Join a circus or become two-bit mediums?"_

_He rolled his eyes. "You hardly think the others want to be on collector cards when they're fifty years old any more than we do, right? I mean – Luther might. But the rest of us sure don't want to be running around in masks and uniforms when we're older. We could go someplace else and do whatever the Hell we wanted."_

_"What would we bring with us?"_

_He shrugged. "We'll find things. Put them together and take them with us when we leave."_

_"And where would we go?"_

_"What does it matter? We'd be going together."_

_"Okay," I said. "I'll look for things to bring with us."_

_"And we'll never talk to the old man again," he finished. "Klaus will leave and so will the others and the old man will die on his own with only the collector-card-versions of us around him."_

▬

_It was the first time that we had ever planned to run away from the Academy; the night after, he showed me the disused room and placed a packet of gum under the broken plank in its floorboards and said that it was the starting point to another world for us._

▬

_Weeks later, I would find the book about the astronaut._

▬


	2. one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> in this episode five really makes a sandwich and yeets himself out of there after 16 years but i slowed it down a little and changed the order of things to fit my narrative (sorry writers of the show it had to be done)
> 
> i know this is a bit ahead but i would love to somehow fit eudora into this i loved that woman 
> 
> there are also a lot of references to before and during that i hope dont seem too confusing in there if you havent read them recently. just trust astrid might be forgetful but she is SENTIMENTAL like diego
> 
> anyway i hope you guys enjoy.

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

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_sixteen years, four months and fourteen days **after**_

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Rather than golden honey-coloured tones in the room, there were lonely shades of blue seeping in between the drawn curtains. Rainfall dribbled from the overhang of the roof and mutely smattered the glass of my window in pale shivering droplets. I was still lain in the bed with bed-sheets tucked tightly around me and my eyes rolled dimly from one end of my skull to another like marbles in a bowl. I imagined it was little lizards scuttling along my limbs that caused the shivers beneath my skin, ghostly ripples of something that had once been there but that blended into the creases of the sheets if I looked for their curled, bobbing tails.

There had been crusted, dried-up lizards in the cabinets of the house with their scales powdered and their eyeballs focused on the foreign beetles in the frames alongside them, wondering where their exotic deserts had gone, replaced with dull, cluttered sitting-rooms stuffed with portraits of masked children.

In a cabinet of my own, I looked around and saw that I was alone. Five had been separated from me in the jump and the house was so silent that I was sure he was not here. I would sense him. I would see blue light. There would be colour. He would be the colour.

Instead, the room was like it had been all those other times in which I clawed myself back into my body and watched it from behind shrivelled lids; it was quiet and spiteful against me, purposefully making itself bleak and dark when before it had been light and gold and _loving_. I resented that room more than anything. I clenched my left fist and turned my right foot and moments later, my left fist clenched and my right foot turned.

There was still a delay but it would soon smooth itself out, I was sure of it.

I wanted to sob and thump my head against the pillows like a little child in the midst of a tantrum, cheeks sticky and red, kicking and screaming and kicking some more. But I was limp. Tears slid along my cheeks and that was all that could be done.

From my left, there was a strange jagged cut of a sound and I realised that it was record which jumped and scratched itself ragged in place, jutting forward before the needle would claw it back. The warbled song which splintered through filled the room with an eerie sense of unreality: _let me – me - play among the – stars - stars, let me see, oh, i wanna see what sp-spring is like…_

I had heard that song somewhere and the needle that scraped against the record turned itself to me instead, raking itself back and forth on my tongue, stirring sound where before there had been none. I swallowed a hard, cold glob of saliva that had clogged itself at the back of my throat and the needle bumped metallically against my front teeth but still the croaked words fell out from between my numbed mouth.

“You said you were right behind me.” I swallowed again. “You said you were _always right behind me_.”

Muffled footsteps reached me from the hall, quietened by the carpet which ran along the stairs like a cascading waterfall and ended neatly at the bottom of the staircase. Yet it was the final click of heels against wood when those soles turned onto the landing that told me it was my mother. I scrunched my hand into a tight ball and it happened with only a two-second delay this time around.

“Mom,” I called hoarsely. “ _Mom_ –…”

The door had been left ajar and the feeble light which came through its frame was blurred with a shadowy figure that paused in the hall and then touched the handle. The door creaked on its hinges and its mahogany shone in a watery flash against the light. On the threshold she stood, carting a laundry-basket on her cocked hip, smiling blandly into the room as if I had stirred from a morning nap and she had come to remind me that there were fresh pancakes in the kitchen that she had kept aside for me, so that Klaus would not gobble them up and Luther would not take them to pile atop all the others that he ate – _a growing boy needs a good breakfast_ , she would fondly say.

“Astrid,” she said, “your father will be so pleased to hear that you’re awake.”

She plopped the laundry-basket beside the door and swept toward me, perching herself on the bed, gently brushing down my hair with her hands. She pressed a kiss to the tip of my nose and the red that painted her lips left a little stain like the reindeer that I had seen in shops at Christmas.

We had not celebrated it like other children with gifts stocked beneath fir trees but rather continued our routine of mealtimes in between training sessions. I remembered, though, that our mother had once baked sugary biscuits, decorated in iced reindeer and bells which she brought to us in our rooms before bedtime where our father would not catch us.

“Where is Number Five?”

“With the others, silly,” she said softly.

Confusion clouded my mind and worried that I was like I had been in my astral form; always wandering in a fog that became denser and denser around me, though it had crept toward me unawares, layering itself deftly while I looked elsewhere, blind and distracted. I wondered if he had miscalculated somewhere in those winding scrawls of numbers sketched between the words that Vanya had written and dropped us further behind in time than first planned, pushed apart in the portal that brought us here so that he had landed elsewhere in the house.

But he had not come to find me or tell me that it had worked and none of our siblings had rushed into the room – almost as if I had never been comatose and the accident had never happened.

“What date is it, Mom?”

She smiled at the bed-sheets. Her head tilted to take in their bunched-up folds and her hand twitched forward to smooth them but fell pliant in her lap. Then she looked at me, as if she had forgotten that I was sitting in front of her.

“Your lip is bleeding, honey,” she said. “Here, let me –…”

She folded the corner of her apron and reached to wipe my mouth, but I pressed the back of my hand against my lip before she could touch me and I tasted the sticky tang of blood on my tongue. I licked my lips and felt something bumpy on my lower-lip. I touched the bump and realised that it was a scab, dried crusted blood that broke and bled fresh when I cut through it with my teeth, staining my chin.

There was something wrong about this world that I could not quite latch onto and which floated near me. There was no frame, no sense that I had fallen into some past memory because I _felt_ like myself. But I still had that confusion, that fog which clouded itself behind my brow and shrouded my thoughts behind a veil – I caught glimpses of clarity but worried I would never again know my own mind like I had before.

“I don’t understand what’s happening, Mom,” I said. “Please tell me what’s _happening_ –…”

“Chocolate-chip cookies,” she said. “Your favourite. I can make a whole batch.”

I stilled at the blankness of her eyes. I had always wished to resemble my mother and I finally did, because her blankness had once been mine; it was what I had looked like to Five for years now, decade upon decade.

She stood from the bed and patted out the little dent where she had been, removing herself at once. It occurred to me that my mother often scrubbed away all trace of herself for the sake of my father, righted cushions propped on chairs that she had used, left no clothes lying around like we did, bleached even the scent of her own perfume from rooms in the house where she had lingered by cleaning and washing and rinsing herself down for him so that he would not know she had been there. She had always stood apart at mealtimes. She had never set herself a place at our table.

She stepped into the hall and smiled serenely at me before shutting the door behind her.

▬

The laundry-basket sat where she had left it. Unlike all the other times, she had left a trace of herself behind.

▬

Standing from the bed had resulted in a bad fall with the bed-sheets tangled around my legs. I yanked them off and hoisted myself up with palms flat into the doughy softness of the mattress. I felt winded and tired, holding still to draw in great gulping breaths that helped calm me. I reasoned with myself. I bargained. It was tiredness, nothing more than tiredness and if I touched the bedpost with my left hand then it would show that I was fine – even better it would show that I was here and that I was alive and not some pale mirage of smoke and mirrors.

I hunched my shoulders forward in an inhale. I breathed out and whispered to myself, “I can feel that I have been changed.”

Somewhere downstairs, glass shattered.

▬

From the staircase, I called out and asked if something had happened and heard only the dull tick of golden hands on a grandfather clock. Soon there was the faint sound of humming in the kitchen and I felt a little placated in the scent of sugar which prickled the house in its sweetness. The walls were still painted in glossy geometric patterns which flowed like vines down to the criss-crossed style of the flooring. The proud arches in the main entrance of the house had not been altered. Neither had curtains and rugs and little touches like the succulent plants dotted around, so that I wondered if we had ever left at all or if it had been some kind of dream.

I had fallen after that fight with Luther and bumped my head. Had I suffered some kind of trauma then and imagined all those other things? I swallowed a bitterness that flooded my mouth. I remembered pinkish-yellow shells on a shrivelled green shoreline but could not recall the minute details like if I had been sitting when I had seen them or standing on a patch of mutilated sand. It blurred together.

I went toward the bedrooms and thought that I would find the others there – in their masks, fresh from a mission and chatting before descending into an argument about who had done what in the fight and I had started to stumble forward more quickly because I could not hear anything, no bickering and no laughing and no Luther stepping in to separate everybody.

My mother had told me that I could find Five with the others, but the house was eerily silent. There was a faucet dripping somewhere and windchimes tinkling and my footsteps against the tiles.

 _Had_ _she told me that I could find Five?_

I stopped.

“She told me,” I said aloud, in the hall, for nobody but myself. “I was sitting on the bed and she was sitting with me and she told me that Five was with the others. My hand had not moved as quickly as I had wanted it – there was a delay. And while I had waited for it to move, she had told me that Five was with the others.”

I turned my head.

In the mirror slanted against the drawers in the room assigned to Luther stood a young girl in white pyjamas, the left pocket stitched with a familiar crest and Latin words curved underneath: _ut malum pluvia_. I touched the crusted sore which stained my lip and felt the dull pain as if it was not mine, because I could not be that thirteen-year-old girl staring out from between the harsh black frame of the mirror.

 _Pale-blonde_ , I thought, _I am pale-blonde and thirteen-years-old and I used to be much older with wrinkles and a curve along my spine because of it_. _I had looked older in my astral form but now I stand in white pyjamas tailored to my shortness because at thirteen-years-old, I am not even tall enough to touch the dangling paper airplanes which drift on strings from Luther’s ceiling_.

“I can feel that I have been changed,” I said. “And my mother told me that I would find the others. I’m here to find them.”

▬

The hard grooves that marked the measurements of our height remained carved into the doorframe of my bedroom. I held myself against the wood, palm flat against my head to compare markings. I was inches taller than I had been years beforehand when I had pushed Klaus aside and asked Luther to hold the measuring-tape beside me. I had scowled when he said that I was the shortest and forced him to measure Vanya. Luther and Diego could not call me names if I was not the shortest anymore; no more pipsqueak and no more shortcake and all those other stupid jokes because I thought _shortness_ meant _weakness_ and I could not let that be _me_.

I made them measure Vanya and revelled in the fact that she was an inch shorter. But nobody called Vanya things like pipsqueak. She never had nicknames like that, whether she had wanted them or not. I was still called names and Vanya was not called at all.

I touched the little _V_ which had been cut into the wood. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was a stupid, _mean_ little kid.”

Stepping into my bedroom, I breathed in a waft of staleness and noticed that nothing had changed. Books slouched on shelves and posters remained pinned to lilac wallpaper. There had been bracelets and earrings held on a girly cushion peeping from a jewellery-box on my drawer but some of the bracelets had vanished.

I crouched in front of the bottom drawer and pulled it out, sticking my hand in the mess of old clothes to find an old diary that I had long since forgotten. I was surprised to find its cheap lock had been broken. I had lost the key for it a long time before we left this house and what I had written inside of it was silly little scribbles about the Academy.

I threw the diary back into its useless hiding-spot and peeled off the white pyjamas and dropped them on the floor like I had always done as a little girl, but then I picked them up and folded them slowly, neatly, laying them on the end of the bed.

I took one of the silver bracelets with a delicate chain and fastened it to my wrist, watching it glint in the light. Instead of focusing on its gleam, I noticed a colour behind it that drew my eyes toward my pillows, because there was something tucked just beneath them. I rounded the bed and pulled out a fluffy old plushie.

It was the chameleon that I had stolen from the museum. I held it against my cheek and smiled.

Returning him to his little hideout beneath the cool shadows of my pillow, I pulled open my wardrobe and dressed myself in underwear with the day of the week written along its band – _was it_ _even_ _Tuesday_? – and tugged on knee-high socks with my skirt pulled up soon afterward to neatly contain the hem of my shirt, tucked into its waistband like our father had always demanded. I fiddled with my tie and then shrugged on a navy jumper, slyly glancing at myself in my own mirror, like a stranger stood in the bedroom with me and I was frightened to look away from them.

In its reflection I traced my nose, my jawline, my lips. I remembered how much I had disliked my ears, too large for my face and poking out from between strands of hair no matter how much I arranged it, the reason that I rarely tied it back in a ponytail, the reason that braids made me feel self-conscious and forced to tug down the faint strands around my temple that might hide them. I took my daisy-patterned clip and pinned my fringe. Even then, it was not the first time that I had sought some normality in this house and I thought the clip might offer it.

Drinking in my appearance with the daisy-clip stuck in place, I realised that it offered nothing.

“Thirteen,” I said. “Looking for the others.”

It helped to say things aloud; arrange the words in the right order and settle them on my tongue to be said when the fog rolled in and clouded me. I slipped on my shoes, saying those words again, tying my laces in those familiar bunny-loops as if Luther crouched in front of me and fixed them himself. Our father had little time for things like bunny-loops in laces, so it had been Luther who taught us the smaller things if our mother was more occupied with removing herself from the house lest our father recall that she lived there, too.

“My lip was bleeding,” I continued. “And there was a chameleon in my bed. I know what is happening.”

I felt that I had found the shoreline when before I had floated further and further from it.

▬

Even if he rarely slept, he had filled his own room with a bed and books and more dead beetles lined behind frames. I touched the golden handle of his door and awaited an alabaster hand to shoot from the black shadows in his room and latch itself around my wrist; _what are you doing, Number Eight, you know that must never enter my quarters_ – but nothing followed. It was me, alone in the room that my father had adorned with scatterings of his strange collection that consisted of foreign birds stuffed and mounted on stands, odd microscopes with weird chains attached and three clocks stacked in a pile as if one could not sufficiently tell time without the others.

I felt an odd comfort in the creak of his bed and told myself that there really was something terribly wrong in this house if I had made it this far into his room and neither he nor Pogo had come to scold me. I felt bold and frightened and bold again.

There were books on his bedside table, crinkled with age. I pulled an orange-coloured book from the middle and flipped it open, mindlessly tracing the Arabic script that filled its pages before I took out another green book written in French. I wanted to imagine what it had been like for my father to lay in his bed with dim candlelight around him, white flame hot against the warm-toned yellow of his lamps, leafing through his books while all the house was quiet.

I turned a page and clippings fell out onto my chest; photographs of me and Five torn from a newspaper.

 _Broadsheet_ , I decided, smoothing down the furry edge of the tear and finding another comfort in that, too. I had become tactile. I wanted to feel and hold and know that I was here. If I pushed that messy pile of books in a fit of rage, then those books would tumble to the rug below and crack their spines and loosen their bookmarks, because I had an impact in how I shifted air and matter and moved the world around me with it. 

The photographs.

Looking down, I remembered that I held them and turned them this way and that, unsure of the reason for my father hiding them between the thin pages of his books, thin like the pages of the Bible.

I sat in the stuffiness of his room and looked at an eagle stuffed and pinned to its stand across the room, its regal stare turned sideways to study me. I asked the eagle, “How is it that I remember some things so clearly but others not at all?”

▬

The kitchen had lost the dense scent of sugar. The countertops had been cleaned but there were no cookies around and my mother had disappeared into the house. I wandered out into the garden, which had once been loved, flush and green and now it sat yellowed and dead, dotted in patches of soil torn up and thrown aside like somebody had scoured the dirt for buried treasure.

I thought it best to find Pogo and started the short walk across the soggy grass. He would explain it all. He would tell me where Mom had gone and where my father had been and where the others were and if Five was truly with them. I was quickly distracted, though, by the slick-black statue of Ben that stood tall despite the mud that gurgled against the stone monument beneath his carved shoes, laced with the same bunny-loop which matched mine. 

“Hi, Ben,” I said softly. “Still wearing your uniform just like me.”

It had begun to rain heavily and I had forgotten a raincoat. I tilted my head back to look up at the bubbling white-blue clouds which shimmered behind Ben. I felt cold and shivered and revelled in it, letting my hair stick to my cheeks and squishing my socks in the tight confines of my shoes, like a little dance in the mud, back and forth. I liked the squelch, liked the stamps left behind. I had not left imprints of myself in a long time.

Behind him, tucked between the spread fingers of a wet tree, was a little blue birdhouse that I had not seen in decades. There was a mesh bird-feeder without any seeds inside it. I walked back into the kitchen and scoured the cupboards, patting around between dusty bowls and sacks of drooping flour. Diego had made the birdhouse but it was Vanya who filled the feeder and watched the birds flutter down from the roofs to peck and nibble.

Stuffed behind endless trays and dishes was an old sack of seeds which had spilled most of its contents inside the cupboard. I scooped what I could into the bag. I rushed into the garden, climbed onto the bench and tried to reach the feeder to tilt the bag into it. Most seeds plopped onto the mud but I filled the feeder halfway, then hopped down onto the path again, a rattle rushing through my ankles.

I craned my neck again and watched the feeder swing limply back and forth until it stilled and its seeds sat in a neat bunch and I felt a weird sense of euphoria.

I looked down at the bag of seeds in my hands and blankness overwhelmed me. “Shit,” I said. “ _Shit_. What was I supposed to be doing?”

“Astrid.”

Shuffling across the dead yellow grass was Pogo. For one moment, one kind and fuzzy moment, I dreamt that he had called for me while I was playing with my siblings and I had been pulled from a game to follow him for a lesson that had slipped my mind. I noticed, though, the round hunch of his back and the silver strands which speckled his head and I remembered. I remembered and rushed to hug him – we were still roughly the same height because his hunch had brought him down to me and I hugged him gently, afraid that he was too old for the kind of hugs that he had once given me.

“Imagine the surprise that I felt,” he murmured, “when I went to your room to check your vital signs and found that you were not there.”

“Mom told me that I would find Five downstairs and –…” I paused, inwardly thinking that that was _exactly_ what I had been meant to be doing – “…I wanted to find him.”

“Come and sit with me.”

Carefully he wiped down the bench and we sat together. I turned sideways to face him, reaching out to hold his hand. His palm was dry, the back flush with soft fur that tickled my skin. These were the little touches that had happened before and which I had never taken note of until then.

"Here she is, back from a land without pocket-watches and grandfather clocks."

I laughed. "I'm sorry," I said hoarsely. "I'm so sorry."

Pogo smiled warmly. "Funny, that," he murmured. "I have been waiting all this time to say the same thing to you."

“You sound a little too calm for all of this, you know.”

Pogo pulled his hand from mine and rested both on the golden tip of his cane, propped between his legs for balance. He looked across the garden. “I had always hoped for a morning such as this, Astrid; a morning when I would find you had left that bed of your own accord. I suppose that I am calm because I had always suspected it would come about itself – that you would return. Though I had rather hoped Number Five would be with you."

Pain stuttered through my chest. He was not here. If he was, Pogo would have told me.

I said, “I had hoped for that, too.”

“In addition, Astrid,” he added, perhaps to soothe me, “normal things do not happen in this household. I should say, from having lived here for so long, that this is no more or less strange than any other day.”

I grinned at him. “Good point.”

“How has your condition been since you awoke in your bed?”

"Condition?"

"Astrid," he said, "do you recall how you fared in our lessons after returning to your body? You often felt unsettling dizziness and stumbled as if you had forgotten how to walk. You had trouble controlling certain aspects of speech. In the earliest days, you heard things that were not there. How well do you think you shall fare after sixteen _years_?”

I swallowed the boil-like lump which blossomed in my throat and pressed hard against my tongue. "I ruined myself," I said. "Is that it?"

"You are not _ruined_ , dear girl," he scolded. "You are recovering from something altogether traumatic and it will take time to readjust. Already you are doing remarkably well. Taking little strolls around the garden and feeding the birds – why, neither your father nor myself had ever anticipated such a recovery.”

I licked my lips and felt something bumpy on my lower-lip. I touched the bump and realised that it was a scab, dried crusted blood that broke and bled fresh when I cut through it with my teeth, staining my chin. Pogo pushed his handkerchief into my hand but it was stitched with his initial on its lower left-hand corner of its rich, green satin. Before I had left in my astral form, Luther had accidently split my lip.

Yet in sixteen years, it had not healed.

"In the first month that you remained comatose," Pogo said, "I conducted countless tests on your vital signs and noticed that nothing about you truly changed. Bruises which had come from training sessions stayed brown and yellow – on the brink of healing but never quite succeeding. The cut on your lip, too, has been there all this time. You never matured. Your brain scans never showed anything abnormal."

"How is that possible?"

"Your father theorised that your body placed itself in a form of stasis." Pogo folded his satin handkerchief and tucked it neatly into the breast-pocket of his coat. "Beyond that, we were unable, from our side, to reconnect your mind and body, though we tried through various methods."

Sinking against the bench, I rubbed my eyes again and then reached into my pocket; whether I had thought that I might find my old pocket-watch in there, I was not sure. I looked at Pogo, opening my mouth to ask what he thought could have happened to Five, but noticed his gaze had drifted behind me, his lips coiled in worry.

I turned and saw that my mother had drifted into the garden in that airy manner which let her glide around between the deadened shrubs. Her mouth was moving but she was not quite speaking, because we could hear no words from her and then she touched her temple as if she had a headache which was something that our mother could not have.

“Is there something wrong with Mom?”

Pogo hoisted himself from the bench. “I will return shortly, Astrid.”

I looked at the drooping bag of seeds that sat on the bench beside me, wondering when I had left them there. I watched Pogo and my mother for a moment longer. She wore her gardening hat. I decided that I would slip out and find Five myself while Pogo was distracted. I heard him speaking quietly with her, stood on the path that ran alongside the mud.

“The lilies are turning out beautifully this year, Pogo,” she said. “Don’t they look wonderful?”

She pointed at a spoiled clump of black branches and smiled.

▬

Putting my hand on the cold, wet handle that would open the door to the kitchen, I felt that same blankness prickle me. I held the bag of seeds. I was not in my raincoat and boots and I was shivering from the cold.

Behind me, my mother said again, “The lilies look wonderful.”

▬

I stormed into the kitchen and threw aside the seeds which fled across the table to avoid me, scuttling under the oven and into those unreachable gaps on either side of the refrigerator. I looked around, smacking my hand firmly against my temples like that might dislodge the memories and then I felt something hazy bubble up from at the sight of the folded newspaper on the table. I walked toward it but not with any certainty in me that I wanted to look at it – only that I had to look at it.

**CITY SAYS GOODBYE TO REGINALD HARGREEVES – U.A FOUNDER FOUND DEAD.**

_Astrid_ , _your father will be so pleased to hear that you’re awake_.

Standing with the newspaper clutched in my hands, I wondered if this was the final sign that I could never again be the Astrid from before. I wore her clothes and had her face but my mind was old and withered. I looked out the window and saw little sparrows pecking at the seeds. I tossed the newspaper onto the table and it skid to the other end, where the flash of an advertisement made me leap forward to snatch it up again. Had I not thrown it like that, I would never have been the name printed in bold above a gaudy splash of yellows and reds around the ring of a doughnut.

**GRIDDY’S – DO _NUT_ MISS OUT ON THESE GREAT OFFERS AT YOUR LOCAL – …**

“Griddy’s,” I said. “I was supposed to meet Five at Griddy’s.”

I tore the advertisement from the newspaper so suddenly that I startled the birds who rushed away into those white-blue clouds.

▬

Cutting through the hall, I folded the advertisement and stuffed it in my left pocket where I had once kept my beloved pocket-watch. I strode with purpose and smoothed my thumb against the paper. If I started to doubt myself, I would pull out that little scrap of paper and all would become clear again. I would not drift off to feed birds and read about the death of my father, not when there were things that had to be done and I would do them, because I was still _here_. I had walked back through all those doorways that I had imagined with Number Five in that hotel room and now it was simply letting my mind readjust itself to this form. I was not smoke and mirrors, I was –…

“Astrid?” I paused and wondered if those bodiless voices had followed from through the portal. “ _Astrid_!”

Stood beneath the arch that led into the living-room, I stared at the stunned faces of my siblings; all _older_ , at least physically. It was Klaus who had called me because he sat near the hall with a glass of whiskey rolling in his hand. The whiskey rolled, warm and golden in his glass, and sloshed onto the expensive cushions that our father warned never to stain on the couch. Klaus glanced down at the stain and added another right beside it.

I thought of feeding birds and reading about my dead father and tasted blood on my lip from that old cut.

“Shit,” I said again.

Allison took a slow step forward. “How are you –…”

“Awake,” Vanya finished, her mouth held in a small little circle of pure shock.

“Are we _sure_ I’m the only one high right now?” Klaus asked.

Klaus had cropped his hair and it sprung around his head in little curls like a cherubim, the curls our mother had once gelled and tamed with a comb. The overcast clouds stifled the sunlight in the room and harshened the bleak purple hue around his sockets. His arms showed little dents from the needles that Vanya had written about, his wrist adorned with the kind of bracelet that hospitals placed on patients, nothing like the silver chain which pressed coldly against my skin on the inside of my jumper.

Vanya had found herself a safe, inoffensive spot on the other end of the couch that kept her close to Allison. Luther swallowed the room in his towering height and I wondered if I had suffered some kind of head-trauma that made him seem so gargantuan, like a child had sketched him from their dreams, with broad shoulders and unnaturally long limbs. Once he shifted aside, my eyes fell to the person I had sought most other than Five.

“Diego?”

Slowly he rose from his chair as if he suspected I was not really there. He staggered forward only two steps, then held himself back. I closed that gap and threw my arms around him. He had the scent of cologne and rain on his skin and the scratchy material of his jumper rubbed against my cheek. I pulled back and grinned at him, straightening the suspenders which held his knives, brushing imagined dirt from his shoulders.

“Next inspection, you’re on your own,” I said.

He exhaled in one scoff of laughter and then crushed me against him, one hand cupping my head, the other snaking around my back. I smiled at the rumble of his chest when he cleared his throat and held me even tighter than I had held him, pinning my arms to my side as he tilted me sideways to press a hard kiss to my temple even in front of the others, but he quickly ruffled my hair to cover himself and I rolled my eyes, reaching to fix my clip.

I paused when I spotted the portrait of me on the other side of the room, safely draped close to the portrait of my father and with its own bulb of yellowish light to soften the oiled lines of my jaw and mouth.

I looked at each of them in turn. “Is that… _me_?”

Luther held his hands in front of himself, drawing up his shoulders. “Yes,” he said. “Dad commissioned them a couple of months after you and Five disappeared.”

“Five,” I said. “Have you seen him?”

Vanya had been anxiously bundling the cuffs of her shirt into small balls that she could roll around in the palms of her hands to soothe herself but her movement ceased at my question. “Well, isn’t he – with you?”

I heard the thrumming of the rain like the ticking of a pocket-watch and my eyes flit to the window, afraid that I would find it bleached and without sunlight. I touched the paper but found no relief in it. He could be there, in that doughnut shop, tipping coffee to his lips and wondering where I was.

Or perhaps that portal had closed on him too quickly. He was supposed to be right behind me. I looked into the hall as if he might be stood there instead, as if I had not seen him with the others because he had moved somewhere that let him fade into the background.

But Five was not one to fade. I had never known anyone brighter.

“I feel that death has come near me,” I mumbled to myself, too quietly for them to hear.

“Astrid, how is this even possible?” Vanya asked.

I swallowed agony and turned to her. I remembered the book and all the things that I had read about myself, like when we had read Sappho's poems and I had imagined her – another Astrid, sitting on a fountain, looking at the world like only she could.

“I don’t know,” I said finally. “Five and I have been trying to come back for years. I woke up and talked to Mom – …”

“Wait, you talked to Mom?”

I turned to Allison. “Yes. She told me that I would find Five with you – with all of you.”

 _Had_ _she told me?_

“Why would Mom not mention Astrid was awake?” Allison asked. “I talked to her half an hour ago. She never mentioned it.”

“She probably wanted us all in the one room before she told us,” Diego said. “Lessen the shock, you know.”

Allison frowned.

"But why would she tell me Five was here?"

"Same thing," he said. "Didn't want to upset you when you just woke up."

“Shouldn’t we tell Astrid?”

I looked at Vanya. “Tell me what?”

Luther swallowed and lowered his eyes. “Dad – died,” he stated awkwardly.

“I know, I read the newspaper in the kitchen.”

Klaus let out a short-lived titter of laughter and leaned his head back against the couch.

“Oh.” Luther coughed. “All right, then.”

From the hall, I saw little wisps of blue light. I was afraid to look at those faint lines because I was sure that my own mind was warning me that I had gone too far and that stepping back through all those doorways had not fixed me like I had wanted.

I had forgotten, too, what it was like to trust myself. I used to make decisions without doubting myself but now I looked for blue light and wondered if I had destroyed myself. I had been thirteen-years-old, the last time that I had really known myself. I wore that body again like it was not mine, but it was, it was the only one that I had known and the blue light in the hall was a leftover from the portal, I told myself, and it would fade soon.

I felt a bump against my shoulder and looked up at Luther. The others watched me suspiciously, too.

Luther cleared his throat. “I was asking if – well – how long have you been awake? You look like you were out in the rain.”

“Luther,” Diego warned. “Don’t you _dare_. Astrid, ignore him.”

I flicked my eyes between them, unsure if I had missed something. “For a few hours, I think,” I answered slowly. “Why?”

Luther steeled himself against the tension that simmered in the room at his question and cleared his throat, shifting himself toward me but still not fully facing me. “Well, I was wondering if you happened to take a look around Dad’s room.”

The blue light warped and dimmed. I watched its little swirls and then looked back at him. “Yes. I went in there and looked at his books.”

“Anything else?”

I noticed how he looked me over and narrowed my eyes at him. “What do you mean?”

“What Luther is asking, Astrid,” Klaus drawled, “is –…”

“Klaus!”

Luther stepped forward but Klaus only gurgled his whiskey and swallowed it before dipping his chin down to his bare chest and rolling his eyes up at me, his lips held in a smile that was not at all like his usual playful grin. It was mean and meant for Luther. 

“What Luther is asking,” Klaus repeated, “is whether you happened to wake up from your coma, wander across the hall, and murder the old man. Then you saw his monocle and thought – _gee, I could sure change up my look with that bad boy_ –… Before you went back into your room and waited for all of us to turn up here and fool us into thinking you had just woken up. The perfect crime.”

“No,” Luther said tightly. “That would be stupid. She wouldn’t _wear_ evidence.”

“Right, because _that_ would be the ridiculous part in what I said.”

“Luther, do you really think I would kill Dad?” I asked.

His gaze flicked down to his shoes.

There was a horrid silence in the room that reminded me of the emptiness of the house as it had been that entire morning and I imagined them all leaving again, letting me wander around with Mom, both of us scrubbing away traces of ourselves before we could be found. I felt left out and embarrassed and wounded, mortally so, as if I had been slashed across the stomach and my organs slipped from the slit and I was exposed to them as plain and human and easily hurt.

Then came the squabbling.

“You got some nerve.” Diego pointed at Luther. “Some goddamn nerve, Luther.”

“I never said that,” he replied. “I never said she did anything. I asked if she had been in his room.”

“Like you _asked_ the rest of us if we murdered our own father, too,” Klaus snorted.

“She was in a coma, Luther!” Allison crossed her arms and settled in a chair. “I can’t believe this.”

“Oh, I can,” Diego said lowly. “I can believe it. Nothing’s changed with you, has it, Luther?”

Vanya sat quietly. Peacock feathers ruffled behind her from the stuffed bird on the mantle, like she wore them in a crown. I watched her more than the others because I was thinking about her book and the things that I could have done differently in our lives when her eyes met mine and she smiled. Perhaps it was not a smile, but rather an innate spasm in her lips that was meant to placate me, placate anybody and everybody who looked at her, a bad habit that had grown in childhood. 

I glanced away from her and noticed another small stuffed bird propped by that portrait of me. It was not a sparrow but reminded me of one.

“Damn,” I said suddenly.

The bickering fizzled out; eyes swivelled toward me in surprise.

Allison loosened the tight grip she had on her own crossed arms, leaning forward in her chair. “What?”

The blue light had wound itself into a thick line that led to the staircase. It had little spikes floating and darting from its main line like static crackled through it. I had the urge to follow it.

“What are you looking at, Astrid?”

I tore my blank stare away from the line to focus on Diego. “Could we continue this later?”

Klaus laughed incredulously. “You were in a coma for sixteen years and now you want to leave and – you know what, I have no idea why I bother watching telenovelas with a family like this.”

“Maybe because they’re the only thing playing in your hospital room after another overdose,” Diego spat.

Klaus snapped his fingers. “That’s it, you’re right, _mi hermano_.”

“Astrid, you might need Pogo to examine you,” Vanya suggested timidly.

“I already talked with him.”

“Mom _and_ Pogo?” Allison cut in. “Seriously? And they didn’t think to tell us anything?”

“I won’t be long,” I said.

“Sure, how about another sixteen _years_? Maybe thirty?” Klaus asked. “If you’re looking for me, I’ll be shitting myself in an old folk’s home. See you then.”

“I doubt you’d be any more or less incontinent by that point, Klaus.”

He gaped at me. “Well,” he sniffed, “I know who’s off _my_ Christmas list this year, that’s for sure.”

I moved but Diego reached for my arm. “Astrid – wait a minute –…”

Luther blocked him. “Hey, we haven’t finished talking yet,” he said.

Then came the squabbling – again.

“You better get your hands off me, Luther.”

“Calm down, Diego.” Allison stood from her chair. “We can handle this like adults.”

“Look, I only want to get to the bottom of this,” Luther said.

“Right, right. You have any more accusations?” Klaus stretched his arms and his joints popped. “I ran a school bus full of children off the road last week, by the way, watched them fall into a ravine and explode. Forgot to mention. I also poisoned some elderly people, set off a bomb, _littered_ –…”

Luther sighed.

Instead of waiting around for another argument to continue, I turned and followed the blue light in the hall.

▬

The rainfall harshened and turned to brief flits of lightning that struck and lit up the hall in white bolts. The blue light momentarily disappeared before it returned and brightened, its hard staticky edges softening into one delicate thread. I kept following.

▬

Furled strips of wallpaper settled on the windowsill. The damp had finally wilted them so much that the cold stone of the wall underneath had shed itself and lay bare, its harsh grey colour reflecting palely into the disused room. The blue light had been wrapped around the wooden beam that blocked its entrance and curled against the small loose plank in the floorboards where Five and I had once hidden our treasures.

I pulled out the plank from the others and reached through the tuft of dust and stringy webs to find that the box was still there, right where we had left it.

I held it in my hands and climbed onto the windowsill, stretching across it. I cradled the box and looked at the arch overhead, its round and smooth blankness, when before it had been colourful and loved. I had followed the blue light for nothing.

I would slip out of the house when the others were not around and rush to the doughnut shop. I was not sure if I should tell them about it. Luther had hurt me and Allison would defend him and Diego would coddle me and Klaus would only ask if he could have some raspberry doughnuts and Vanya –…

The floorboards creaked and the wooden beam shifted.

Lazily I turned my head to look, thinking that Diego had followed me and found the hidden spot in the house that had only been meant for Five and I. But the lonely figure which crouched and slipped through the gap was much shorter than Diego and wore knee-high socks like I did, smacking his head on the beam when he stood too quickly.

It was Number Five.

“Goddamn it,” he grumbled. “Goddamn this stupid – _ow_ –…”

Sweet happiness bubbled in my chest and I left the tin-box on the windowsill so that I could run to him and hug him like I had hugged Diego, pressing one hard kiss to his cheek, then burrowing my face into the crook of his neck. I was blind with white-hot tears that dampened my cheeks and dried in the curl of his collar. Like me, he was in his old body – his thirteen-year-old self in schoolboy shorts that now seemed strange on him after so many years in ragged clothes and later some fine suits.

“What took you so long?”

“Guess I got a little lost along the way.” He snorted and pulled away. “I landed outside, in the courtyard. Luther and the others were there but you weren’t. I started to think –…”

He swallowed and I understood what he had wanted to say. I had felt it all day, too.

“I didn’t know what to do,” I said. “I didn’t know if you had made it ahead of me and gone somewhere – …”

“Where would I go without you?”

I shrugged weakly. “I don’t know. I saw this little advertisement about Griddy’s and I thought maybe you had gone there because I – I couldn’t stand to think of you being somewhere where I couldn’t find you, Five.”

He wandered toward the windowsill with his hands in his pockets and sat down. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I know what you mean.”

Crossing the room, I sat beside him and curled my legs beneath me. He remained slouched against the sill, thinking to himself. He reached for the tin-box and popped it lids. The acorn rolled out and fell to his shoes. He bent to pick it up and smiled to himself. In the light, the acorn seemed more black than brown, the pale circle at its centre dulled and dried.

“I left it there for you,” I said. “When you left that day and I thought you would come right back. I thought you would find it funny.”

“Dad sure would have.”

“You heard.”

“I heard,” he nodded, letting out a sigh. “I heard he croaked in his room, alone. I know I said a lot of things about the old man, but I couldn’t think of anything sadder than that; dying alone.”

I had forgotten what he had looked like as a boy, not because of those funny splotches which ruined my memory but because I had spent so long with the older version of him that his younger self had faded in detail, like the slant of his brows toward a little wrinkle atop the bridge of his nose and the furrowed dimple that came in pensiveness. Even if I could not look into his mind, I was sure that he was thinking about those darker times in the apocalypse, when I had disappeared on him and he had been left behind.

He had been sure that that would have been his fate: to die alone.

“Five –…” I started gently.

He wanted to ignore that fear and stuff it down someplace where I could not reach it, so he tried to distract me. “Must have screwed up the calculations,” he said. “If you made it ahead of me – I must have done something wrong. Today is the 24th of March, which leaves us with one week to save the world.”

“Where should we start?”

He pursed his lips. “The eyeball,” he said finally. “It has the serial code on it, we can follow that.”

“But the Commission – do you think they’ll find us?”

He pulled the Polaroids of us from the tin-box. “Maybe.”

I watched him. “You still have blue light around you, Five. It led me here, like I knew you would turn up eventually. Like a prediction of where you would appear.”

“You were in your astral form for years, Astrid. There had to be some kind of side-effect that would come with returning to your body. If seeing blue light is all that there is, then we should be fine.”

Through the fogged-up panes of the window, I saw the blurry figure of Luther stepping out into the garden, the others trailing behind him beneath umbrellas.

“We should be there,” I said. “Come on –…”

I slipped off the windowsill. His hand latched around my wrist to hold me in place.

“Is that all there is, Astrid?”

_My lip was bleeding. And there was a chameleon in my bed. I know what is happening_

“Do you want to tell me tonight?” he asked.

“Okay,” I said. “Tonight.”

He shrugged one hand from his pocket and held out his little finger for me to hook around mine to seal yet another promise between us.

▬

In the kitchen, everybody apart from Diego, Pogo, and our mother were sitting together, seeming glum and bored and forced to sit together like bold schoolchildren kept behind after class. All eyes darted toward me and Allison rose for no reason at all from her chair. It seemed to occur to her only after she had done it that she had no reason, so she wrung her hands together and said, "It's raining again."

I looked at the windows. "Oh," I said.

Sixteen years of separation and thinking of all the things that could be said to them and that was what had slipped out.

Diego steered our mother into the kitchen and toward the doors that led into the garden. Luther lolloped behind with the urn cupped between his gloved hands, tracing the lavish details carved into its sides for comfort. Like a wounded puppy, he looked at me and I purposefully looked away from him.

"All right," he said. "Let's just – all right."

We followed behind him into the rain and Five propped an umbrella above us. We stood together, between Klaus and Diego.

"Did something happen?" Mom asked.

"Dad died," Allison said. "Remember?"

"Oh. Yes, of course."

"Is Mom okay?" Allison asked.

"Yeah, yeah." Diego avoided my eyes. "She's fine. She just needs to rest. You know, recharge."

Klaus placed a cigarette between his lips and the smoke lapped at Five. He waved it off and glared at Klaus who only blew another smoke-ring at him.

“Knock it off, Klaus,” Five spat.

“Why should I?”

“It’s annoying,” I supplied. “And rude.”

Klaus rolled his eyes. “Does anyone else wanna stand beside the twins from _The Shining_ over here?”

“Let’s just get this over with,” Allison sighed.

Luther tipped the ashes and a lump of grey powder landed with a plop on the grass.

"Probably would have been better with some wind," he admitted.

Pogo looked for speakers where there were none. All the people who had lived with him and known him stood there in that garden and yet only Pogo was willing to speak for him. It had been a long time since I had seen my father and even longer since I had thought about him very deeply. I found it strange that his life and all his work were found in that little pile of ash that dampened in the rain and turned a deeper molten grey. 

"He was my master and my friend," Pogo finished, "and I shall miss him very much. He leaves behind a complicated legacy –…"

"He was a monster," Diego said flatly. "He was a bad person and a worse father. And the world's better off without him."

It was not the loss of father which brought me pain, but the pain of _Pogo_ losing my father. To him, it had meant something to have known my father like he did.

"Diego!" Allison warned.

"My _name_ is Number Two. You know why? Because our father couldn't be bothered to give us actual names. He had Mom do it."

"Would anyone like something to eat?" Mom asked.

"It's okay, Mom," Vanya murmured.

"Look, you wanna pay your respects, go ahead. But at least be _honest_ about the kind of man he was," Diego said.

"You should stop talking now," Luther said.

"You know, you of all people should be on my side here, Number One. After everything he did to you – … He had to ship you a _million_ miles away – …"

It was like our childhood, like nothing had changed in their sixteen years apart from their clothes and size. But not their tics like the subtle tightening of Luther's jaw and Diego's clenched fist, which meant a fight was coming.

"That's how much he couldn't stand the _sight_ of you!" Diego exclaimed.

Luther threw the first punch like he almost always did and I felt myself wither. I was annoyed but not totally surprised, either. I had hoped that being older had made them change but understood that that was my own fault for having expected it. I had wanted things to be easy for us, for _once_. Like the children that we had been, we had made our plans simple and cut into little steps – if we simply got back here, we would save the world, and when we saved the world, we would be happy.

Then, when swinging for Diego, Luther hit the statue meant for Ben. It toppled and smashed and I felt that I had toppled and smashed with it.

I turned on my heel and marched for the door. This time, it was Five who followed me.

▬

Lying flat on my bed together, we used our arms for pillows behind our heads and stared at the scuffmarks in the ceiling. Klaus had thrown little aliens made from a weird jelly against the white paint and they had stuck with brown imprints that were still there, as if their shadows watched us from above.

Looking at them then, his shoulder pressed against mine, I thought the alien shadows seemed more like commas, curled in a line, ended with a fat dot on one end. I had climbed onto a chair to peel off those sticky aliens and fling them at Klaus until I toppled and fell hard against the floorboards. Klaus had bought me three chocolate bars to stop me crying and telling on him. 

“I thought it would be different,” I said.

Five understood and shrugged; the blankets shifted with the movement. “I didn’t.”

“If we told them, maybe they would help.”

“Sure. I have complete faith in them, especially after Luther dumped what was once our father on the grass without thinking about the weather conditions. What a swell send-off for the old man.”

I turned my head to look at him and smiled. “We shouldn’t laugh at that.”

“I’m not laughing,” Five said. “Can’t you tell I’m broken up inside? They didn’t even provide refreshments like any other normal family would for a memorial service. I got sixteen-year-old gum from our old tin-box and asbestos poisoning for my troubles. You can’t tell me those old rooms up there aren’t full of the stuff. Could be what got the old man in the end.”

“Luther asked if I had killed him.”

Five paused, glanced down at me, and then shrugged. “Well, he might have gotten bigger, but he sure didn’t get any smarter. Can’t say I’m surprised. Miracles can’t always occur.”

“And Klaus didn’t get any more sober.”

“You should _really_ lower your expectations for this family. You’re dreaming too big.”

The room was like a cocoon when its door was closed, cutting off all the sound in the house that had come from the others’ constant bickering back and forth.

“But Mom isn’t the same,” I said quietly.

Turning his head, his eyes flit around my face and I wondered what he was looking for this time. I wondered if he found it, too, when he shifted again to look at the ceiling and sighed. I felt a swelling of hot tears that warmed the skin of my cheeks in their heaviness. I had cried more today than I had in decades and I wondered if all that sorrow had been stuffed behind my eyelids and I had shed them with blinking and looking and taking in the world like only I could.

“Tonight,” he reminded me. “You said you would tell me tonight.”

I rolled onto my side. “I’m not remembering things here either.”

Five did not react and remained on his back, perfectly still. He allowed only his vocal chords to move and they did so in a coarseness that we both ignored. “It takes time to readjust.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe this is how I’ll always be.”

There were footsteps in the hall. Both of us remained silent and listened to them outside my door. Slowly, the dull thud of boots continued toward the other end of the house.

“I tore that advertisement from the newspaper about _Griddy’s_ because I was afraid I would forget if I didn’t have it with me,” I told him; the tears settled in my eardrums and rolled in the cochlea to drop onto my sheets in little spots. “I’m afraid, Five. I’m afraid that this is all that’s left of me now. I’m _scared_.”

The yellow light of my lamp swam in his eyes. “I know.”

“I think I’m scared of this place, too,” I continued. “Scared of how much it changed even if it hasn’t _really_ changed at all. I remember our time in the apocalypse better than I remember our time with the Commission and I’m not sure why. I remember the fort and the red wagon and the tape-recorder and _Delores_. God, Five, do you think she’s all right?”

“Just – wait here,” he said.

“What do you – …”

Sparking through the spot where he had been was a shot of blue light, one narrow sword of it that hovered in place. I sat up in the bed and looked dumbly around my room. There was a strange hum of static in my right eardrum that popped when he reappeared in the room, at the end of my bed, dropping a pile of sheets in front of him before he vanished again. Wobbling holes of blue echoed in mid-air like miniature portals. He teleported to the same spot and threw down two baseball-bats he had clearly stolen from Luther and then he disappeared and reappeared with a little sack in his hand that he threw onto the ground.

“What are you doing, Five?”

He pulled out the chair from my desk and draped the sheet on it, then tucked the other end into the bedframe to create a lopsided fort of his own. I started to understand and pushed off the bed to help him, wedging the bats against the desk to help prop the sheets a little more but they drooped and eventually we settled for the small and cramped space created underneath the sheet. He placed my lamp in there and plugged it into another socket, filling the fort with warm light.

“Wait under it for me.”

I sat cross-legged under the sheet like he had asked. There was something silly and sweet about it. It had no flap like the original fort but he could lift the side and sneak under. 

“Okay, close your eyes.”

“Oh, come on, Five –…”

“Just do it, Astrid.”

I scrunched my eyes shut for him.

“ _Finally_. Guy tries to do something nice every once in a while – all right, you can look.”

Slowly I opened my eyes and saw that he had placed four things in front of me: a tape-recorder whose label PROPERTY OF LUTHER had been mysteriously ripped off, a red coal train, a notepad with pen attached, and a Barbie doll whose hair had been snipped and torn out in chunks, her cheeks scratched in black marker, her legs welded together. I glanced at him and felt a smile tugging at my lips.

“If you tell anybody about this, I will never talk to you again,” he grumbled.

“That is such a lie.”

He pressed the button closest to him on the tape-recorder. It wound itself back and ticked forward when he released it. Through the crackle of sound which made it seem more distant and faded than it really was, there was a scuff of sound like somebody was holding the recorder and covering its front: _goddamn it, it is working_?

I heard his voice and my smile hurt my cheeks.

 _we have to do it over again. delete it, five. let me try again_.

Five reached out and stopped the tape.

“You kept it,” I said. “All this time you kept it, Five.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “Yeah, I kept it,” he grumbled. “I mean, you hardly expected that if I pressed play, it would be a recording of Luther doing his best Cyndi Lauper impression, Astrid.”

I paused, eyes wide. “His best –…”

“Bottom left drawer in his room, where he kept his socks, used to be a stack of tapes. Pretty sure he destroyed all evidence, though. I didn’t see them when looking for the tape-recorder itself.”

“Oh.” I smiled at him again. “But you kept the recording of us.”

“I listened to it when – when you were really – struggling,” he said. “At the end. Before we got back here.”

I felt my smile fade. “I didn’t realise. I’m sorry, Five.”

His throat rippled and he turned his attention to the red train. “Couldn’t find a wagon,” he said. “Figured this would do. The Barbie used to belong to Allison but Klaus melted her legs and drew all over her face. Allison cried, remember?”

“Mom bought her ten more.”

He snorted. “Always got her way. The Barbie can be our temporary Delores. We could always find the real one. She would be in this timeline, after all.”

“And the notepad?”

He picked it up and flipped it open. “If you forget what you’re supposed to be doing,” he said, “then write it down first. Or I’ll write notes to remind you.”

He snatched the pen from its holder and hid the notepad behind his arm, hiding it from me. I rolled my eyes at him but smiled despite myself, pretending to peek. He wrote on both sides, folded the paper, and held it out to me. I took it and opened it gently at all corners, looking at him before my eyes fell to the page to read his neat handwriting.

_help five save the world_

On the other side, he had written:

_and remember that you promised to always come back_

▬

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know im sorry i said i would make things easier for astrid and then i wrote this hahaha


	3. two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hello friends!!
> 
> i'm back (again). there are some references in this to the two previous parts so if you've happened to click on this and not read them, that's ok and you could prob continue without them but i hope you're not confused lol
> 
> i received a lot of comments asking if i was keeping this platonic or fivexoc and i thought about it, watched some episodes, and figured i should keep it as it was, which i also explained in some comments. it would be hard to change now anyway and besides i included some vanya quotes to show why. if this isn't the pairing you like, i'm sorry. there'll be other stories that suit you though and i would appreciate if you read those instead, there are different pairings with different ratings that you might prefer.
> 
> i don't do anything explicit in this story (i mean the rating would have told you that already). i can't keep everyone happy soooo i'm just gonna do my own thing and i appreciate those who commented asking that i stick with what i was doing already. i appreciate it a lot!
> 
> otherwise thanks for the comments and support (we made it over 400 views i was so happy lol). i was actually in the middle of writing this when my microsoft word subscription ran out and wouldn't let me edit so i finished on google docs hahaha back to normal soon though. 
> 
> i hope you're all doing well as i say anytime that i post because i know times are rough. i hope you are all as safe as possible wherever you are in the world. i'm an optimist (you would never guess when you read my stories and i put astrid through bad things heheh) so im hopeful everything will work out. 
> 
> thanks again guys. all the best! xx

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

_after: two_

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

The asphalt was sleek and wet like it had melted and I would sink into its soft, fleshy blackness if I stepped out onto the parking-lot. The heater billowed stale brittle warmth that lapped against us like the unpleasant hot breaths from a stranger stood too close. The warmth slipped through the hollowed gaps along the bottom of the windows in the car where the seals had worn and sprung up in a curl. Sounds seeped through the gaps too, like droplets of rain losing their grip on the splintered pipes of the diner and throwing themselves into puddles. Then there was the whining static of the neon-sign of the diner, which swelled in electric blisters and popped into the night.

Together we sat in the car and said nothing, staring blankly into the parking-lot while he tapped mindlessly against the wheel. The heat had left us and the cool chill of night was pooling around us. In the rear-view mirror, we looked like aliens with skin flushed acid blue from the light of the doughnut shop.

I remembered something that Pogo had once said about aliens in another universe where time was not understood through pocket-watches like mine; the pocket-watch which had been broken years after he had said it and which I missed now more than ever. I patted around the worn lining of my left pocket out of habit, as if the watch might be in there, but touched the folded-up paper that Five had given me instead.

Somehow that felt as comforting as if I touched my old pocket-watch.

“Forty years,” he said abruptly.

I looked out the window at passing cars. “Forty years,” I repeated. “Flew right by.”

Leaning back against the headrest, he rolled his eyes toward me and snorted. “Well, they say that happens when you’re having fun.”

In those few seconds after he had spoken, his smile faded and his eyes lowered to the little droplets of rain which speckled the window. Perhaps it reminded him of something painful. There were a lot of painful things for him to remember for the both of us and I reached for his hand and hoped that it might distract him from those memories found in the rain.

In the apocalypse, with its mutated weather patterns, the rain used to sting him and sizzle against his skin in black peeling marks. I touched the back of his hand and felt it was smooth, though there had once been a scar from the night that he had been drunk and slit his hand on metal.

I felt a dull surprise simmer in me that I could remember something like that and turned his hand to follow the lines on his palm like they might stir another distant recollection in me.

“You almost got an infection,” I said.

Five was watching me closely. “When?”

The memory rippled up from the potholes in the parking-lot.

“We were in our twenties,” I said slowly. “I think you drank vodka and you tripped. You slit your hand on a rusted sheet of metal trying to catch yourself. I remember you were mad because you said it was a waste of alcohol to wipe down your wound to avoid infection. It looked awful for about a week. Red, sore. I was afraid you would die of infection.”

The car was quiet and I heard my own words filter back to me. I had not remembered anything so clearly in a while and I saw his eyes were glinting in the light.

“But I wanted some stale coffee at this old dump so badly that I survived,” he said. His tone was supposed to be light and joking but his throat was too tight for that. “I haven’t thought about that in a while, you know. Been so hellbent on getting back here that I hardly thought about anything else.”

“You should think about slowing down and taking a nap or something.”

“Oh, yeah? And what about you?”

Our hands slipped apart. “What about me?”

“Do you feel tired, Astrid? Or hungry or – or _anything_?”

Another stranger left the diner. The bell tinkled into the parking-lot and stirred me. I watched the waitress through the window, tilting a tray against her hip and loading it with used coffee-cups, plucking crumbled napkins and straws and plates from the tables. She was humming something to herself. I could not hear it from the car but her lips moved and her body swayed and dipped back and forth in a small dance. I had not danced like that in a long time either. There was a lot that I had not done, that we had missed out on.

“Cold, sometimes. But not tired or hungry,” I said, noting the pinch between his brows. “Don’t look at me like that, Five.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re worried,” I said.

His eyes lingered on me. “I’m not worried,” he said. “I just want some damn coffee already.”

Sliding out from his side of the car, he slammed the door shut and stood in the parking-lot, strange and out of place in his culottes and tie. I waited and wondered if he would walk into the diner without me but his outline stayed frosted in blue both from the saturated tones of the artificial lights behind him and the weak, watery pool that had remained around him ever since he fell out of the portal. I smiled to myself and opened my door, stepping out.

He held the door to the diner for me and rolled his eyes when I stood on the threshold, grinning at him.

“Would you hurry it up, Astrid?”

“I thought you only wanted your coffee.”

“Yeah, yeah, come on – I’m freezing my ass off in these damn shorts.”

Compared to the cold in the parking-lot, the diner was comforting and toasty. Behind the booths sat the old jukebox that had been there when we were kids, though no record played. It was only the sharp scuff of his shoes against the tiled floors that filled the diner because even the waitress had vanished someplace.

I ran my hand along the worn padding on the seats in the booths and tried to recall which had been ours, the last time that we had sat in here with the others, right before Klaus had puked in the alleyway.

He chose a stool rather than a booth and I plopped down beside him, spinning from side to side. The scent of doughnuts oddly stirred the first sense of hunger that I had felt.

I said, “Five, I know I said that I wasn’t hungry but now I feel it – only when I saw the doughnuts.”

He glanced at me. “Then get some.”

I noticed his mood, sullen and pensive. “Do you want coffee to avoid those naps we talked about?”

Impatiently he smacked at the little bell on the counter-top. “Forty years,” he said again. “And _this_ is the place we chose in our entire town to visit first.”

“Nightmares happen to everyone, Five. It doesn’t mean you can’t handle this stuff with the apocalypse and the Commission.”

His hand hovered over the bell. “I don’t have nightmares,” he said, gritting his teeth.

The stool beneath me squeaked and I slowed, catching my shoes on its round metal foothold. I reached out and pulled his hand away from the bell. “I never slept in those forty years, Five. I know that you did and I know that you had bad dreams. I saw what they did to you. So, why don’t you tell me what they’re about?”

“You know, Astrid,” he muttered, yanking his hand back, “I don’t have to share _everything_ with you. I don’t have to share this.”

It would have hurt, had I not watched how he pressed his palms against his face and breathed out.

“Just let me – let me deal with this one by myself, all right?”

Behind us, the bell that dangled in front of the door tinkled again. I rolled the stool and my knees banged against the hard counter. I was not used to myself yet, not used to a body that could suffer bruises again. I rubbed at my knees and took a glance at the man who slid into the chair right beside us. He wore a baseball-cap that he placed on the counter and he smiled at me like Vanya often did; politely and briefly so that it was merely a twitch of the lips.

The waitress appeared. She breezed through the door at the other end of the diner and noticed us from afar, her sole three customers marooned together on the island of her counter. She rushed forward, breathy and smiling and oddly cheerful in comparison to the blankness of me, the glumness of Five and the awkwardness of the older man – well, _physically_ older – who sat alongside us.

“Sorry, sink was clogged. What’ll it be?”

She pulled her notepad from her pocket and I remembered mine, rummaging in my pocket and setting it on the counter-top in front of her. She noticed it, tilted her head, and smiled like I had done something precious. It was hard to hold the pencil that I unhooked from its holder; it was like my hand had _forgotten_ how to hold it. I touched the tip against the page and tried to write the first letter. It was wobbly and childish and nothing like the way my handwriting had been before the apocalypse.

“Uh, give me a chocolate éclair,” the man said.

“Sure. Can I get the kids a glass of milk or something?”

I glanced up from the page and my eyes wandered to Five. I found the knotted snarl of his mouth amusing and rolled my stool back and forth again.

“The kid wants coffee. Black,” Five said flatly.

“Four doughnuts, please,” I added. “Any kind. No glasses of milk, thank you.”

“Four? Really?”

I glanced at him. “I would have taken five but the offer on the advertisement was four doughnuts for a dollar. Those are not the kind of offers you pass up, Five. Basic economics.”

Writing another letter, I tried to think of all the other things that should be done in the few days that we had before the apocalypse came along. I wrote the first line, slanted and loopy, then leaned back to examine what I had written.

 _Apologise to Vanya_.

Beside me, Five began talking to that man who was still placing letters of his own in his crossword puzzles. I continued with the next line. I had more than enough things to do that I hardly listened to Five, though I did find it strange that he was speaking to this stranger because Five loathed small-talk.

In fact, Five loathed _people_.

 _Tell Luther that you did not kill Dad – also make amends with Luther_.

The waitress brought a plate laden in four doughnuts for me and then pushed a cup of coffee toward Five. I took the pink doughnut with sprinkles and ate it in three bites, ignoring the stranger and ignoring Five, who shot me a raised brow before he sipped at his coffee. He said something to the stranger again when I was on the chocolate doughnut and considering asking for another four because I felt that nothing would fill me.

“You’re doing an old man thing right now, Five,” I said.

“What?”

“Old men do that,” I said. “Talk to people at random places, like bus-stops and benches in shopping malls. Tell them how it used to be in your day and why everything nowadays is so awful in comparison.”

Five scoffed. “It is _not_ an old man thing. Most people would call it polite conversation.”

“Yeah, but you’re not polite.”

Deadpan, he swivelled his stool toward me. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I shrugged. “All right.”

“You don’t.”

I scratched down another few lines: _ask about Mom – apologise to Diego for leaving – ask Klaus to take a_ _shower_. “Okay,” I said again, pulling my eyes from the notepad and smiling at Five. “Old man.”

Annoyed, he rolled his eyes. “Look, forget it. Can I just borrow the notepad and pencil for a second?”

I was really pushing his buttons for no other reason than finding that scowl he gave me so funny, like steam would billow from his eardrums at any moment. “What for?”

“ _Astrid_.”

He snatched the pencil and notepad, eyeing the last thing written before nodding in agreement and flipping to a fresh page. He asked the stranger if he knew where we would find MeriTech, the place that had manufactured the prosthetic eyeball sitting in his pocket; the same one that we had carried around for forty years or so, staring at its dull brown colour and wondering who had owned it. The stranger seemed unsure of why we would need the address but hesitantly took the pencil from Five and scratched it down.

“Works for a towing company,” Five told me quietly.

The man offered the paper and Five tucked it into his pocket, thanking him and pointedly ignoring the weird glance that the man threw at us before he slid off his chair and bid us a goodnight. I scratched another line beneath the others on my list and scribbled three harsh lines underneath it: _ask Pogo if he can fix me_.

The bell tinkled when the man left; it tinkled again when the gunmen entered.

Five sipped his coffee and I took another bite of my doughnut and neither of us did anything other than that because we were not afraid of them and had assumed that the Commission would be sending goons after us anyway. I was even less afraid because I had fought beside Five so often that it felt like he was an extension of myself and if I moved, he would naturally move with me. I finished the last doughnut and wiped its sticky crumbs on some napkins before adding the last line on my list.

 _Kill anybody who comes after you from the Commission_.

“I bet I win,” I told Five.

He put down his coffee. “Oh, I doubt that.”

I neatly closed my notepad and placed it in my pocket. 

“So, let’s all be professional about this, yeah?”

I turned and found the gunman was much too close to Five for comfort, its muzzle mere inches from the back of his head. Five swallowed another mouthful of coffee and smacked his lips together.

“On your feet and come with us. They wanna talk,” the gunman added.

“Nothing to say,” Five said.

“It doesn’t have to go this way. You think I wanna kill some kids? Go home with that on my conscience?”

Five looked at me and I looked at him. We smiled.

The faces of the other men around him were cock-sure and bored. I was certain that the Commission had not told them about our gifts, because they seemed to really think that we were two kids caught unawares in our local doughnut shop. It seemed almost unfair to send them into something so blind and stumbling; _almost._

“Well, I wouldn’t worry about that,” Five said, sighing. “You won’t be going home.”

Like string, a thin line of astral energy left my palm and wound itself around the muzzle of the gun aimed at Five. He took another sip of his coffee and calmly wiped the back of his mouth, though his eyes moved to me and he nodded.

Harshly I yanked the muzzle up. Bullets ran along the ceiling overhead in a dotted line of dark craters. I turned his gun sideways while it was still in his arms and made him shoot his comrade. The sound of bullets was like droplets plopping violently against a puddle in a fast, maddened rhythm.

“One for me,” I grinned. “I’m already ahead, Five.”

He glared. “We’ll see about that.”

The stool which he had been sitting on swung with a metallic grind once he disappeared, a thin warped line of blue shimmering in a dance to mark where he had been. Behind me, there was a sound like tarp slit open with a sharp knife. I spun around to defend myself but saw that Five had slashed the throat of the gunman who had first spoken to us, and whose gun I had used to kill his own comrade. His body collapsed against the counter with a smear of bright red drawn by his arm as he fell.

Five twirled the knife and smirked at me. “What were you saying, Astrid?”

Before I could answer him, he vanished into another flash of blue and I pushed myself off my stool, smiling to myself. I felt astral energy swirl coolly in my palms, crackling like maddened static and casting dense shades of white around me.

One gunman moved toward me. I surrounded him in that same white light which sparked around me and made him levitate. His limbs were pressed against his sides, his steel-toed boots were brushing the scuffed tiles. I slammed him against a wall. His skull smacked wetly against it; his head lulled.

Something slashed at my arm and I yanked it away, startled by the lick of pain which followed. It was pain, hot and sudden and distracting pain, perhaps made worse only because I had not felt anything like it in decades, having floated through the world in my untouchable state.

Clinking against the tiles was the throwing knife that had cut me and I remembered Diego and I thought: _why am i thinking about diego and a cut on my arm when i need to focus, focus -_

Another gunman stepped across the body of his fallen comrade while tucking the rest of his knives into his belt. His boots stuck to the tacky pools of blood and his rifle glinted in the heavy blue light that swept through the diner from all those portals Five left behind. I was sure, though, that that gunman could not see that light like I could.

Pulling my hand away from the wound, I saw my palm was sticky with blood and looked up again at that man. I lifted the scattered objects left in the diner, contained in spherical balls which floated mid-air and spun languidly; shards of the plates which had smashed to the ground floating alongside splintered glass from broken windows, turned between the casings that hovered and rolled slowly.

Then the padding was stripped off the booths and the tables wobbled and tilted and the cash-register jolted from the counter, banging loudly against the ground and spilling coins which were swept toward me in the swirling astral energy that flew around me.

I felt that I would implode if I did not release it fully.

The shards embedded themselves into his chest and the casings clapped against his skin, shot forward with one radiating burst of astral energy that ended only when a long splint of glass lodged itself into his left eyeball with a slick _pop_. The coins tinkled against the tiles, the tables steadied, the padding dropped uselessly; all of this before the man had even slumped to his knees and tipped sideways. His fists twitched – twitched and twitched, then went perfectly still.

“Astrid?” Five was in front of me. He touched the tattered fold that showed where I had been cut through my jumper. “Astrid, are you all right?”

“Yes.” It sounded like a lie because it was one. “What about you?”

He watched me for a second too long, so that we felt it drag between us. “Peachy,” he answered finally. “I got four.”

“Three.”

“I win, then.”

Tugging his tie from the reddened throat of the man he had strangled, he tucked it under the curl of his now crinkled, blood-speckled collar but left it loose and unfinished, something that was unlike him. He lifted a pair of chairs and placed them against a table and then flopped into one with a tired sigh, running his hands through his hair. I suspected that he had worn himself out with jumping around the diner like he had done, the blueness of his portals still alight around him but fading one after the other in slow yawns.

I pulled off my jumper and slid into the seat beside him, rolling up my sleeve.

There were training lessons which had ended in wounds like this one, which dribbled thick streams of blood and pinched with stinging agony if touched. I could remember plucking thread like I had done for embroidery with my mother, looping its end through the head of a needle and closing wounds by myself. 

I started to recall something through the muddled paleness of my memories and it hurt more than the cut.

“Dad had Diego hurt me once,” I said.

Five scooped napkins from the ground. “What?”

“I think we were eight-years-old.” I looked into his eyes. “I remember Diego was pleading with him, asking him to let him do anything else – but Dad made him throw a knife at my arm. It was supposed to cut me so I could stitch it myself. It was important that we learned how to clean our own wounds. When that knife hit me earlier, I was thinking about Diego but I assumed it was because he uses throwing knives, too. But it wasn’t that – it was that he used them to hurt me once but he never wanted to do it.”

He was quiet. Then, he said, “I need to cut out the tracking devices from our arms.”

“Dad could have done it any other way,” I said. “He could have let me do it to myself – Hell, even _he_ could have done it himself. But he made Diego do it and it wasn’t because of his gifts. Diego kept saying sorry – and he stuttered on the word. I remember I stitched up the wound myself. Diego went to his room after. Wouldn’t talk to me for a while."

“Yeah, well, at least we can stitch ourselves up now, huh? Silver linings.” He lifted his lips in another fake smile, something more mocking and callous. It dimpled his cheeks and dropped immediately. “None of it matters given the old man is dead anyway.”

Bursting from his chair, he stalked across the room and shifted aside dead, limp bodies while looking for a knife sharp enough to slit open our arms and let us pull out the strange lump of a tracking device which had been placed beneath our skin by the Commission.

I slumped low in my seat and watched him. I had upset him by remembering. But he used to wish that I would remember. Now that I had, it had upset him. He crouched beneath the table of a booth and reached for a knife that had skidded underneath during the fight. It was already covered in blood from its tip to its hilt.

Five brusquely yanked his chair out and sat again. “Are you happy that he croaked? Is that what this is all about?”

“No.” There was a flatness to my tone. “Not happy. Not sad, either. I’m not sure. I know I wanted him to love me but now that I look back on it, I’m not sure that that was something I could have asked of him. He called us kids for convenience but that wasn’t how he saw us.”

“And how did he see us?”

“Like the exotic beetles framed in his cabinets.” I smiled humorlessly. “Like the birds mounted and stuffed around the house. Things to be collected; that’s how he saw us. I think I would be happier if I could accept that. I know he cared about you. Even more than he cared about Luther, I think. Even if you talked back. You aren’t supposed to sense that kind of thing with parents. But then again, he was never a parent. He was a collector.”

“This will hurt, Astrid.”

Gently he turned my wrist so that he could draw the knife along the soft pink flesh there, his eyes checking mine. I watched the narrow cut fill with dark-plum blood and then I pressed down to feel for that lumpish device, which slipped and slithered around like some living thing, looking to flee me, looking for escape by sinking low behind either side of the wound. Five had slit open his own wrist and pushed his fingers into the wound, cursing to himself each time that he grasped the blinking round bug of a device and tried to rip it out but missed. 

Eventually, it slid out onto his palm and he leaned back in his seat with a sigh.

“You won,” I said. “Again.”

“Yeah? And what’s my prize?”

Shards of glass crunched and ground beneath the soles of my shoes when I leaned forward, cradling my wounded arm against my chest with my hand pressed against it to stem the trickle of blood. The adrenaline had left us; we were tired and hurt and wanted nothing more than this calm, quiet moment between us to recover.

I waited until he looked at me and quickly pecked my lips against his - then did it again, clumsy and stupid and not sure what I was supposed to do beyond that but he moved, tilted his head and I tilted mine and it felt better and still somehow my chest was alight with flutters that made it hard to focus on anything else. 

I pulled back and felt myself turn pink and dopey. “Sorry,” I said. “I just - I could never do it before and not during the apocalypse either.”

“But you wanted to.”

“I wanted to.”

“Funny,” he said. “So did I.”

I was warm. My cheeks ached. 

Slowly he reached out and touched the cut he had made on my arm, his eyes assessing me for permission before he carefully pushed at it, feeling for that hard lump which still shifted and moved. Through the pain which made my eyes water even more, I watched him pull out that small device and hold it in his hand. It blinked like his did. He put them together on his palm and closed his fist. 

“Come on,” he said. “We should get back to the house and clean these cuts properly.”

Though he opened the door of the diner for me again, I rushed back to grab my notepad from where it had slipped off the counter. Spots of blood dotted its pages but it was otherwise unharmed. I grabbed the last doughnut on my plate and caught sight of the coffee that Five had not finished. I took a quick, bold sip and scrunched my nose in disgust, leaving it behind and taking my doughnut with me. 

“Coffee is awful,” I said. “You waited forty years for _that_?”

“That,” he said, “and something else.”

His lips quirked and I turned pink again. 

▬

The heater in the car rattled and fogged the windows. I fiddled with the dial for the radio and settled on a station which played songs with tinkling beats and harmonies and I sang along, tapping at the fabric of my skirt. 

“Strawberries, cherries,” I hummed, “and an angel’s kiss in spring…” 

The traffic lights flushed from red to green and I wondered why that song was so familiar to me. 

▬

I stood behind him with needle and thread in hand and stitched a gash on his shoulder. I found plasters in his drawer, decorated with cartoonish trains. He flinched only once, when the needle first pressed against skin and turned it pale-white and then blistering red when it punctured him, but soon the wound was sewn together in a neat line and he wiped the needle in alcohol so that he could return the favour and stitch up my arm.

The house was gentle in its sounds, nothing but the faint whine of old wooden beams stretching lazily in the afternoon and the draw of thread strung up from its bobbin as he worked and the dip and curl of his mattress beneath me as I sat on its edge. 

I followed the delicate row of stitches and glanced at his face, his eyes somewhat obscured behind the hair which fell forward and curled against his brows, furrowed tight in concentration.

The Commission would send agent after agent after agent to catch and kill us and then there would be no cartoonish plasters for us, no stitches and bruises. I remembered that strange, pale girl named Pruitt and wondered if she might appear someday between the flashes of a crowd swarming around me, approaching faster and faster so that I could not avoid her. 

On his bedside table, he had left his copy of the book that Vanya had written and I reached it for it with my good arm, holding it open with one hand.

“We were never a real family,” I read. “We were our father’s creation. Family in name, but not in fact. In the end, after our brother Ben had died, there was nothing really connecting us. We were just strangers living under the same roof; destined to be alone, starved for attention, damaged by our upbringing and haunted by what might have been. We all wanted to be loved by a man incapable of giving love.”

Five snipped the last stitch and admired his handiwork. “She thinks they hate her,” he said. 

“They don’t hate her,” I said. “I don’t hate her.”

I closed the book and dropped it on the bed. The child-face of Vanya looked back at me. I had a yearning to hear her speak, like the closed mouth in her photograph on the cover might come to life and I would listen to the soft way that she spoke until I fell asleep, because I was tired then. All along I had not felt anything but now it was creeping upon me in slow trickling sleepy vines, up along my ankles with its strong roots taking hold.

Even sleepiness was delayed in me, now. It came long after I should have felt it. 

I wondered if Vanya would have spoken like she did had she not grown up with strangers damaged and starved; if she would raise her voice more and apologise less had she not been told so many times to erase herself the way our mother did.

“She would understand, if we told her,” he said. “About the apocalypse. She would hear us out.”

The notepad crinkled in my pocket and, through the lining, pressed into my stomach. _Ap_ _ologise to Vanya._

“I want to see her,” I said. “But I want to bring her something.”

▬

The pinkish-yellow plushie of a chameleon sat between us in the car, watching us with its once-glossy eye now scratched and dulled. The rain had eased but the streets were still dark and wet. I took the plushie out from the car when we finally arrived at the apartment block where Vanya lived.

Five had scoured the house for its address, tearing out drawers and folders while I went to find the chameleon. He had eventually come across an address book which belonged to Pogo, who had dutifully marked her address in black ink on the last page.

The entrance required a key which neither of us had and so we moved around to the side of the building for its fire-escape. The ladder was rusted and pulled up to its balcony. 

“I could teleport up there and check the windows,” he said, "and I could let you in through the front. Or you could climb onto my shoulders and I could hoist you up there to try and reach it - then pull it down for us. Might not be an easy balancing act for you but the view on _my_ end would be - …”

I tucked the chameleon under my arm and held out my palm like I had done in the diner, flat and aimed at the ladder. Astral energy spun around its last rung and dragged it harshly downward in a grinding screech of metal against metal until it popped into place in front of us. I looked at him and took a secret pleasure in his open mouth and raised brows.

“Or that,” he said. “Could have just done that.” 

“What were you going to say there, Five? Would be _what_ , exactly?”

“Never mind. Forget I said anything.” He motioned toward the ladder. “Ladies first.”

“I’m not falling for that. You’re going first.”

“Are you implying that I would do anything untoward?”

“I know what kind of books you read in the apocalypse.” I lightly pushed his shoulder forward. “ _Y_ _ou’re_ going first and _you_ can check if the windows are open.”

Grumbling, he grabbed the ladder and lifted himself up, climbing easily. “I thought Luther was the one who gave orders.”

“Times have changed, old man.”

“If you keep calling me old man, I have to call you old lady," he called back.

Stood on the squeaking fire-escape, Five opened the windows which would let us into Vanya’s apartment. He leaned against the railings and waited for me, looking down with his arms dangling over the side. I kept the chameleon tucked under my arm. I realised that she was on the second floor, something that he had told me but which did not register until I gripped the ladder and climbed its rickety frame with hands stained orange from the rust.

I suffered that jelly-like sensation in my legs when I passed the apartment on the first floor because it seemed too high already and I wished I had remembered how badly I trembled in times like this because I was not sure it was the ladder which shook from its rot or if I was accidentally rattling it in my fear. 

“Astrid,” Five called, “it really isn’t that high up. You’re almost there.”

Even if he had meant it kindly, it only embarrassed me more that I felt so afraid of a little height but the ground beneath me was a dark glittering ocean like the parking lot had been earlier. I focused on the rust which flaked and fell away each time that I moved my hands further up the bars of the ladder.

He put his hand on my shoulder when I reached him and it made me flinch in surprise.

“See, you made it,” he said. “Easy peasy.”

He was crouched at the mouth of the ladder, taking up the space on the fire-escape so that I had to clutch onto it while he fiddled with the latch on the window. It popped open and slid upward with a whooshing sigh.

“Five, please move out of the way before I _push_ you out of the way - then you can tell me how it’s not _that_ high up here.”

Pursing his lips, he nodded like he had expected that and crawled through the window. I followed him, gripping his arm as I squeezed through the gap and stood beside him. Once on steady ground, I released him and breathed out, walking forward to loosen the tight coils in my legs. Vanya had decorated her apartment sparsely but lovingly, placing books and compositions around wherever she went.

Unlike our house, hers seemed lived-in and cared for with its lush green plants and fresh newspapers and small, forgotten things left behind in the rush of her morning like a box of cereal on the counter and a pair of slippers thrown haphazardly in the hall by her bedroom. 

I flicked on the lamp and moved around her sofa to sit down, finding comfort in its softness. I plopped the chameleon beside me. I could curl up like a stray cat which had slipped into her apartment through that same window and settle here for sleep until she roused me.

She had left throws on her sofa and I wondered if she ever dozed off here herself, too tired to lift herself and bring herself to bed. I wondered if she had thought about me and Five and where we might be on nights like that. I was sure that she had and it both saddened and warmed me. 

“You would think with all the training we went through as kids, she would remember to keep her windows shut,” Five muttered, flopping into an armchair across from me. “Locked, bolted. It’s dangerous. You know what kind of sick criminals are probably crawling around this part of town?”

“You’re right, we’re here and I’m almost certain I saw Klaus outside too.”

I rolled my eyes at his huff.

“Oh, come _on_ , Five - she’s an adult. She can handle herself.”

The lamp was a warmer orange than the rust on my hands. Five stood from his armchair and walked slowly to the kitchen beside us, wetting a cloth to clean his own hands before he tossed it at me. I scrubbed off the orange and he neatly folded the cloth, leaving it beside the faucet.

Then he wandered, looking at her photographs, turning her books to read their blurbs, even poking at the drooping leaves of her plants. Outside, the passing shriek of the subway was muffled. I could hear the floorboards sigh and lift in the apartment above. With the blinds drawn, I felt she could seal herself away and live quietly, peacefully.

“If we had never gotten stuck in the apocalypse,” I said, “I would have chosen an apartment like this. We could still have it, someday.”

He had drifted to the windows and watched the streets below. “Someday,” he said.

▬

Beneath the watery greenish light in Vanya’s bathroom, I felt washed out and overly-tired. I still had not slept but it seemed that all that coffee had kept Five awake and not at all drowsy. There was a sense that sleeping was wasting time we barely had. I splashed cold water against my face and sat on her bathtub, looking around at the bareness of this room; one cactus sitting on the windowsill, a folded towel left on her laundry-basket, some generic bottles of shampoos and lotions lined on a shelf beside me. 

I stood, smoothing down my skirt, righting my tie. I stepped into the hall and closed the door gently behind me. I heard the scrape of a key against the lock and saw Vanya push into the apartment, peeling off her scarf and coat. She turned and cursed softly at the sight of Five in his armchair.

I felt that I was intruding somehow and I had the oddest urge to hide in her bathroom, between the bottles, where she would not find me but I could watch her sit down from afar and speak to Five without disturbing them. I had wondered for decades what I might say to her and had imagined poignant speeches that I had since forgotten. 

Perhaps she heard the floorboards shift; perhaps she had simply sensed me behind her. Whatever it was, her head turned and the light from the lamp made her eyes seem damper than they probably were, more full and sad and looking for the same kind of words that I sought, too.

She settled for standing from the sofa and approaching me, taking a moment to stand in front of me with her usual awkwardness, like she had wanted to do something and could not bring herself to do it now that she had the chance. 

So, I hugged her. 

It was what I had done with Diego and it felt better than words, better than remaining apart like we had done for too long. Though I was in my thirteen-year-old body, Vanya was just as small and petite and roughly the same height as me. She placed her arms around me, seeming unsure of herself but patting my shoulder lightly. I caught the smallest smile on her lips when we parted, drawing faint lines at either side of her mouth. 

“I meant to do that sooner,” I said. I hoped that she would understand what I meant and added, “Sorry that we broke into your place.”

“Are either of you hungry? Thirsty?”

“I could do with some coffee if you have some,” Five said. 

I added, “I’m fine, Vanya. Thank you.”

She busied herself with finding a mug and boiling her kettle and rushing between refrigerator and counter. She seemed more comfortable when she could occupy her hands and look elsewhere. I returned to the sofa and she brought Five his coffee in a mug, holding it out to him. He took one sip and smiled. 

“Now this was worth forty years of waiting far more than the other stuff I had today, Astrid.”

I rolled my eyes at him. Vanya settled beside me, tucking her hands between her knees. She was making herself small again, even in her own home, shrinking herself at the end of the couch with limbs drawn close to her sides. She scrunched her cuffs like she had done at our house. 

“Five said you both wanted to tell me about what really happened after you disappeared.”

“Technically we should begin with the week _before_ we disappeared,” Five sighed. “Because that was the week Astrid managed to move a die while in her astral form, during a lesson with Pogo. Pogo was impressed but Dad was not. Astrid was disappointed. So, I asked her to show me how she had moved the die. We used a marble instead.”

Vanya was staring at him, unaware of how wide her eyes had gotten. “ _And_?”

“And she moved the marble while in her astral form,” he said, shrugging. “I teleported closer to her to see it, and in doing so, Astrid realised that she could see these - _portals_ , as we call them.”

“Portals,” Vanya repeated. 

“Like doorways,” I said. “And if I step through them, I can follow Five. But only in my astral form. If he teleports someplace, I can step right through and appear there, too."

Vanya slouched even further in her seat, her mouth held open in a small ring of surprise. “Oh,” she said. 

“Yeah,” Five said, smirking. “ _Oh_. Well, that same week, I also got it into my head that I could teleport through time and I wanted to show the old man how wrong he was in thinking I couldn’t do it. And I’m sure you can put the rest together.”

Though he could have told her that it was my fault for having given him the book about the astronaut, he had left it out. I looked at him closely, hoping that he might look back. But he only cleared his throat and readjusted himself in his seat, taking another sip of coffee. 

“You really followed him,” Vanya said. She was not looking at me even if her words were meant for me. She was looking at her coffee-table but her stare was blank and distracted. “We always had theories - well, until…”

“Until what?”

She focused on Five. “Until we stopped talking to each other, I guess. Until we realised it would only lead to an argument. I mean, Dad didn’t want it discussed either, he would never let us talk about it. So, we just - dropped it. With losing you two and then Ben, it seemed like there was nothing left to hold onto.”

“Yeah, well, things weren’t so great on our end either,” Five said flatly. 

“When I followed Five, I didn’t think of the consequences,” I said. “I saw the portal outside the house and I just - ran through it. I left my body behind and I didn’t think about how I would get back to it. I found him sitting in the rubble.”

“So the world was really...gone?” Vanya glanced between us, her hands now nervously knotting the ends of her sleeves. “There was nothing left at all?”

“Ruins,” I answered. “Dust, debris. That was it.”

“I survived on scraps,” Five said. “Canned food, cockroaches, anything I could find. You know that rumour that Twinkies have an endless shelf life? Well, it’s total bullshit.”

“I can’t even imagine.” 

“You do whatever it takes to survive, or you die. So we adapted. Whatever the world threw at us, we found a way to overcome it. You got anything stronger?”

I bristled. Five looked pointedly at me like he dared me to say that he could not drink but I said nothing. He had handled more than one glass of whiskey in his life and when Vanya brought it to him, I tried not to let it bother me. I was not against him drinking, exactly. It was more against him getting flat-out drunk like he had done in the past, because one drink became three, became seven, became whatever would knock him out fast enough. 

“I tried to bring us back.” Five stared into his glass. “It never worked, not until the end, after all those years had passed.”

“Five,” Vanya said worriedly, “you’re bleeding.”

Seeping through his blazer was a dark glinting spot that shone wetly when he held his arm toward the light. He cursed and gulped the last dregs of his coffee. He stood up from the armchair and Vanya stood too. 

“I have disinfectant in the cabinet in the bathroom,” she said. “And bandages, I can help -...”

“It’s all right, Vanya. I can handle it myself.” He smiled, like an afterthought. “But thank you.”

Rounding the sofa, he went toward the bathroom and I turned to watch him. Vanya took her place again. I felt a lump press against my side and noticed the plushie of the chameleon had become wedged between the cushions. I pulled it out and brushed its soft material. Its coiled tail had lost its rounded spiral and I tried to fix it.

I was not sure how to begin with Vanya if Five was not there, because he filled in the blank spots and I was nothing if not blank around her, wanting to say the right things but losing them on the tip of my tongue. But it was Vanya who spoke, her eyes on that chameleon. 

“I put that on your bed.”

I looked at Vanya. “What?”

“After you and Five disappeared, Mom wanted to keep your room exactly as it was for when you’d come back,” she said. “We could visit your new room, but we were never supposed to go into the old one. But I found that chameleon we stole at the museum and I...I thought it was only right it should be in your old room. I snuck in there and put him under your sheets so it would look like he was sleeping. Kinda silly, really.”

“No.” I smiled at her. “Not silly. It meant a lot to find him again. I thought about that trip to the museum a lot, Vanya. I read your book.”

Timidly she asked, “What did you think of it?”

“I thought that that Astrid character was dreadful. I wouldn’t want anything to do with her, personally.”

Vanya rolled her eyes but smiled all the same. She reached out and took the chameleon from me, curling its tail with her finger. She said, “You know, I can’t quite agree with you.”

“I’m sorry, Vanya.”

Behind me, I could hear Five rummaging around in the bathroom. I suspected he was purposefully taking his time and I was grateful for it. Vanya held the chameleon in her hands and looked at me with wide, doe-eyed uncertainty. 

“I was a lousy sister. I didn’t listen to you. I talked over you and I made you feel small and I made you do things even when you didn’t want to do them, like stealing these stupid little toys all because I wanted them. And I’m even more sorry because if I had never followed Five and gotten stuck, I would have stayed that way. I wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with how I was.”

“Astrid, you don’t know that. If things had worked out differently, if we hadn’t been raised how we were…”

She trailed off, letting out a deep sigh.

“Diego was the angriest, I think.” She looked at me and smiled sadly. “Luther was mad, sure. I think Klaus was in rehab when the book was published, so I’m not sure what he thought about it, but I know he wasn’t super happy about it. Allison wasn’t thrilled about it either because she had this film coming out and all the press asked her about was the book and her childhood and nothing about her role. But Diego was furious.”

“He’s always taken things to heart. I’ll talk to him. He’s just young and -... “ I paused at the sound of her laugh. “What?”

“You, calling Diego young when you’re thirteen.”

“I _look_ thirteen,” I grumbled. “But I’m much older than all of you. I had a lot more time to read that book. I had a lot more time to accept that I was a mean kid.”

“No,” she said. “You were _a_ kid, like the rest of us. A lot has changed, Astrid.”

I swallowed hard. “Vanya, I want to tell you something else. Something that only Five knows.”

The faucet was running in the bathroom and the cabinet clicked. I was not sure how much longer he would pretend to fix a wound that he had probably already stitched and bandaged. I took the notepad from my pocket and handed it to her. Carefully she flipped through its pages and her face pinched with a frown. 

“When I had my first lesson with Pogo, he told me that I mustn't practice my astral form anywhere outside of his study,” I said. “Not even on missions. I would have to master it before he would allow that. So, we practiced weekly and I could only stay outside of my body for about three minutes. Pogo was afraid that anything more would damage me - mentally, physically, he wasn’t sure. But he did think that it would damage me. And he was right.”

“What happened?”

“I tried making it back from the future on my own a few times,” I said. “I made my own pocket-watch but - it didn’t work. And then I started to forget things. Five would tell me something and I would forget it within a couple of hours. By the end - I mean the very last few years - I couldn’t remember much at all. I wasn’t well, Vanya. I was - fading. I suppose that’s how I’d describe it best. I was fading. Sometimes, I disappeared from Five and I think something was happening to my body whenever that happened. But now I’m back and I’m still not fully able to remember things. I write them down to help me.”

Her brows were furrowed; her eyes were glassy. “I can’t imagine what you’ve been through.”

“He made a mistake,” I told her. “But I couldn’t let him make it alone. I didn’t want to leave. I missed you all so much. I would have done anything to come back but it never worked out like we planned. I've wanted to apologise to you for the longest time and I was so afraid that I would never get the chance.”

Vanya swallowed and looked down at the notepad still in her hands. She pulled the pencil from its holder and crossed off the line which read: _apologise to Vanya_.

“One down,” she said kindly. 

She wrote her own words underneath it: _take another trip to the museum in Montgomery_.

She had seemingly forgiven me, but I felt it would take more than words for us to mend what had been broken most of our lives. I was not sure if Vanya simply wanted to keep the peace, or if she really did accept my apology. I took the pencil from her and added: _with Vanya_.

Vanya read it and smiled.

Five left the bathroom and returned to us, immediately moving to the kitchen to refill his glass. He took a sip, swirled it in his mouth and swallowed, spinning around to face us. The dark stain on his blazer remained, but its navy colour made it easy to overlook. I watched him warily, already sensing that he would drain that bottle if Vanya let him and if she did not, he would find a liquor store nearby just to spite her. He was like that, when he was in a mood, and I could see one was slowly clouding him because he narrowed his eyes at Vanya. 

“Do you believe us?”

Vanya blinked at him, surprised. “What?”

“You think we’re nuts, that we’re making it up.” He moved toward her and both Vanya and I stood from the sofa. “How could we both be lying?”

“It’s a lot to take in, that’s all,” Vanya said quickly. 

“Five.” His eyes shot to me and I tilted my head at his drink. “Remember all the times you and I had arguments after you had some whiskey -...”

“ _Remember_ ,” he repeated, taking another sip. “Now that’s a good one, Astrid."

If he noticed that he'd hurt me, he ignored it.

"She thinks we’re just two loons who came to tell her some wild, made-up story for shits and giggles.”

“She believes us,” I said. “Right, Vanya?”

She nodded, albeit weakly. “It was unexpected, Five. You and Astrid coming back like you did, I didn’t know what to think. I thought you would time-travel back -...”

“Oh, gee, wish I’d thought of that. Time-travel is a crapshoot. I went into the ice and never acorn-ed.”

“It wasn’t that simple, Vanya. I was too far from my body and he wasn’t able to jump back either. But we tried.”

“Of course we tried,” Five snapped. “So, what, you still don’t believe us?”

“Dad said time-travel could mess up your mind. And Astrid mentioned her own...difficulties,” Vanya said carefully. “Maybe that’s what’s happening here? Two people can share a -...”

She went silent, noticing his glare.

“A what? A _delusion_?" he asked. "Hell, what would you know anyway? You don’t know what it was like for us there. This was a mistake. You’re too young. You're too naïve to understand!”

Putting down his glass, he turned on his heel and marched for the door. I took a step forward but I was not sure that I wanted to follow him, not when he was this irritated. But it was Vanya who called his name and he paused, his hand on the handle. 

“I haven’t seen you in a long time and I don’t want to lose you again. That’s all. And it’s getting late and I have lessons early and I need to sleep and I’m sure you do too. Here.”

She moved to the sofa again and began pulling down its throws, neatly straightening them across the cushions. 

“Astrid, you could sleep in my bed or I could get some more blankets - …”

“She can have the sofa,” Five said. His mood had simmered out. “I’ll take the armchair. I had crippling back pain before, when I was older. Now that I’m young again, it’s gone. So I think I can handle one night sleeping in an old armchair.”

“We’ll talk in the morning again, okay? Promise.”

She began walking to the hall. I spotted the chameleon and called out, “Vanya?”

When she glanced back, I tossed the plushie at her.

“Sweet dreams," I said. 

Vanya smiled and turned off the light in the hall but the lamp burned between us, casting a warm glow around her living-room. Again I felt that rush of safety and comfort in her apartment. Neither of us did anything, preferring to stand on either end of the coffee-table. 

“We need to keep looking for whoever owned the eyeball,” he said. He looked me over. “Are you tired?” 

“Yes.”

“Fine. It can wait.” He sat down in the armchair but frowned when he noticed I did nothing. “Aren’t you gonna sleep?"

“If I fall asleep, you’ll leave.”

“No, I won’t.”

“Promise?”

“What are we, six-years-old? _I promise_. Scout’s honour. Besides, this MeriTech place won’t be open for a couple more hours.”

Nodding, I moved to the sofa and arranged the blankets. “Five,” I said, “I want to promise you won’t drink that whole bottle either. In fact, you won’t drink it at all.”

He groaned. “Come on, Astrid, gimme a break. I won’t drink it.”

I pulled the blankets around me and settled down on the sofa, propping a pillow underneath me. I closed my eyes and felt that heaviness cave in around me, so that it was easy to drift off into another half-sleep. I heard him say something and shifted the blankets to look at him. 

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. Go to sleep, Astrid.”

“Not until you tell me.”

“I said ‘ _don’t go anywhere_ ’,” he said harshly. “It was something I used to say in the apocalypse when you were... forgetting things and I thought you might disappear on me again. I thought that if I said it, you would stay and you’d remember things and now it’s just a dumb habit I’m trying to break. Happy now?”

I watched his outline, waxing blue from the light which followed him permanently now, blending into the streetlights which blazed behind him through Vanya’s blinds. 

“I’m not going anywhere, Five. Even if I did -..” - I rolled over and snuggled closer against the cushions - “I told you before that I always come back.”

He flicked off the light and let the only sound come from the cars passing on the street below. 

▬

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didn't add it earlier so as not to spoil anything but some lines/scenes are evidently altered because i would rather not write the script word for word where possible - you've all already seen the show (i assume) so you will probably notice the changes. i'll have to alter things like the time spent doing things and fill in some blanks (like i dont remember how five knew where vanya lived but that's ok maybe i missed it)
> 
> additionally i do not know the economics of doughnuts in america but in stores in my country you could buy like 5 doughnuts for a euro so i dont think im being unreasonable with my pricing for griddys, but any doughnut economists can gladly correct me (while i eat 5 doughnuts that i got for a euro)
> 
> also i forgot in season 1 episode 1 vanya says she used to make sandwiches each night after five left and put them in the kitchen with the lights on so he wouldn't be afraid when he came back (im paraphrasing) and i just...ugh...vanya...she breaks my heart...she deserves...the world (i mean...she kinda destroyed it once but you know...she's still a queen)...


	4. three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys!!
> 
> my eyes are burning because i've been staring at a screen for hours now and its really late where i am, but i MUST write a note. after what i posted last, i felt i wanted to explain that i'm changing the tags and rating and posting only on ao3 because many suggested this as the sole solution. i do not want to give up on the story but i also really don't want to hurt/offend people SO i think the only thing i can do is give it warnings and hope this explains to people before they begin what they're getting. one writer says pseudo-incest?? i used that but im not really sure if it counts as pseudo or not and there doesn't seem to be a better term. please, if you think something else should be mentioned that i haven't considered or that would make it a little 'safer' then do let me know. i really am dreading posting a little even if it's just to ao3 lol but im hoping that this resolves it and we can continue.
> 
> i will leave up that previous note for the moment. i want to be clear on my intentions and see if changing the rating to mature (i dont think this counts as explicit?) will suffice.
> 
> it was a whole mess and i was conflicted with writing but i do care about astrid having an end (eventually) to her story. the word count for this chapter is way longer than i normally do because i can only write like 500 words a day due to college work so i hope that makes up for all the fuss i gave you guys with my last note!! i was really in my FEELINGS hahaha. anyway, i hope you're all doing well. i hope we can continue with this story WITH warnings. i actually checked what others mark their stories on for a number eight/five story and i hope im allowed to use the same tags. i've used FF for so long that tags are another ballgame. so, i can only hope this is OK. or else im really gonna be pulling another chris crocker moment crying about my story ahahah (we do remember crocker right)
> 
> more notes at the end to discuss the chapter to avoid spoiling stuff hehe. thank you for the feedback and letting me know how you felt about continuing. 
> 
> much love,  
> kaiseriin xx

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

_after: three_

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

The rainfall dribbled against Vanya's window like it had done in that room where I had been kept, comatose and unaware of the world shifting around me. This time, though, I heard it and I was stirred from sleep, listening to the thumping patter which beat against the window-sill like maddened war-drums. Five was still in the armchair, slouched against its cushions, reading a book that he had taken from the shelf beside him, sipping fresh coffee brewed within the hour, its steaming wisps flicking from its inky colour.

He liked coffee black and strong and I liked its scent, heady and luring me from dreams already forgotten behind a blurry filter.

I had not had a morning like this in a long time and let myself revel in it with eyelids papered lilac from the colour of her curtains which smothered sunlight. He held something in his hand, the hand which cupped his book and held his spot in its pages. It was the prosthetic eyeball. Sometimes I wondered if he found comfort in rolling it in his palm like he often did. I watched its slow turn in his grip and remembered the die that I had turned – the first time that I had ever moved anything in my astral form.

I scrunched my eyes tightly together and tried to recall what I had been thinking about when it happened. I had become a tactile person through astral projection, which seemed like something of a contradiction; turning from solid flesh and bone to wisps of smoke like those rolling from his coffee worked better if I thought about touch and scent and little feelings of love and affection.

Remembering what I had been thinking about that first time, though, was like trawling through those dreams that I had had sometime in the night and which had fled from me the moment that my eyes opened and saw light. Before I had turned that die, I had thought about Vanya. I could not say what I had thought about, exactly, but only that the timid features of Vanya floated up to me and stayed when all else dripped away.

She had been upset about something in the garden. I remembered the sound of mud squelching beneath her boots and her arms held out to push someone away and I worried that it might be me that she wanted to push off from the path that wound its way through the grass.

But it had been Klaus.

I remembered then that he had almost crushed some slugs whose fat, writhing green bodies had flopped onto the stone path and rolled dangerously close to his boots. Klaus had not crushed them, when she pushed him away. He had merely bent down to pluck them up and pour them down my shirt while I thrashed and screamed.

I remembered the disgusting wetness of their slime and their blind, squirming bodies catching in the creases of my shirt until Diego helped shake them loose and Vanya had carefully put them back in the grass where they scrunched into tight, round green balls and waited for us to let them be. I had not forgotten that. I was still here. 

The toilet flushed and I heard sluggish footsteps into the only bedroom in the apartment. I pushed off my blankets and stood to right my crinkled skirt. Five closed his book and swallowed the last dregs of his coffee. I watched him smooth down his dark hair and then I immediately reached out to muss it up again, snorting when he slapped my hands away.

I stepped over his legs, stretched out in front of him, heading for the bathroom. I did not really need it but I wanted him to hear the squeak of the faucet and the rustle of the towels before I went and gently pushed open the door which led into Vanya’s bedroom.

She was turned away from me. Her hair had been pulled from its usual low ponytail. She was in a dream that meant she did not hear me gently closing her door with a soft whisper of _thanks, Vanya_.

▬

In the hall, Five was waiting for me, having washed his mug of coffee and leaving it beside the sink to drain its suds. He held a black scarf that he had taken from the stand beside the door, its wrinkled folds showing that it had probably not been used in a while. He tossed it at me and I caught it, looking at him in confusion.

“Still dark out,” he said. “Thought you would be cold otherwise, even if you might not feel it right away.”

The greyish light hardened his face but there was a softness in his eyes. I draped it around myself slowly, a heavy redness to my cheeks that I hid behind its folds. I walked beside him through the hall and dared myself to take his hand before we reached the door, something which seemed small and insignificant but which had been impossible for us in all those decades spent trawling through ash and dust.

▬

In the alleyway, the car sat with dew speckling its old, frosted windows and he scraped at the white patches which clouded its windshield. I slid inside and fiddled with the heater which blasted faint sighs of warmth at me and I flinched at a solid pop of sound. He had teleported from his side of the car to mine and I pushed open my door to ask what was wrong with him, because he seemed panicked and defensive. He blocked my door with his body and moved aside only when I pushed a little more forcefully. I followed his gaze and saw a man in a black suit walking toward us, a briefcase swinging from his right hand.

Five took one step forward and I reached to grip his arm because the briefcase was a shade lighter than normal. It had initials beneath its clasp. The man passed us while checking his watch, unaware of us. Five rang out the tension in himself by rolling his neck from side to side. He marched around to his side of the car again. I watched the blue light trail behind him and glanced at the portal that he had left behind in his rush to jump beside the car; to _my_ side, like he had thought the Commission would reach me before I had even noticed.

“Five?”

He had opened his door but held firm at the call of his name. He was testy and agitated and his jaw showed it most of all, ground tight as he observed some distant spot in the alleyway beside him, focused on nothing yet unable to tear his eyes away from it all the same. Those lines of blue around him seemed harsh and jagged.

“Are you okay?” I asked hesitantly.

“Fine,” he answered.

“I know you’re lying,” I said.

His eyes locked on mine. “Just drop it, Astrid.”

Droplets shimmered along the pipes behind him. Newspapers rolled against the dumpsters in a light wind. It was an unsettling moment that went against the warmth of the apartment which now seemed distant and blurry in my mind. I nodded and he nodded too, as if something had been agreed, before we both slid inside the car and felt the meagre spurts of muggy air spat from its heater.

▬

The elevator was full of interns who shuffled aside piles of paperwork and clipboards to glance down at us; then at each other and then at the golden numbers which glinted overhead the silvers doors. The elevator would glide to a soft, whooshing halt and half the interns around us would spill out into a sea of computers and chatter and more interns would slop back into the elevator and we would continue upward, upward and upward, stood motionless in the middle of it all.

It seemed that we were the only stationary things in this building, because carts would be wheeled on and wheeled off and buttons would be pressed and briefcases opened and then swiftly closed and phone-calls answered between floors and we would watch those numbers ticking forward overhead, unaffected.

“I should do the talking,” I said.

“And why is that?”

“Because I am pleasant,” I said playfully, “and you are not.”

He whistled, his lips pulled into a smile. “Ouch.”

The golden numbers finally shuddered to the ninth floor which had been listed as its ocular department. Five swept out his arm in a gesture of politeness for me to walk ahead of him, grinning at my scoff. I strode into the whiteness of the lobby that marked the kind of buildings I loathed, made from steel and glass and not an ounce of colour to be found anywhere else other than the golden numbers of its elevator.

I smiled at the young secretary and asked for someone who might help us with prosthetic eyeballs.

“Do you have an adult with you?” she asked.

Five rolled his eyes to me, brows raised as if asking the same thing.

“Yes,” I answered. “Well, _one_ adult.”

Confused, she glanced between us and then typed and tapped and asked if we might wait a moment. Five had fallen into another sullen mood and refused to sit on the white sofas nearby. He preferred to spin that eyeball in his hand and watch those who passed us. I suspected that it was not only the threat of the world ending which made him so sour but something more than what he wanted to tell me. I looked at the marbled wall behind me, blowing my cheeks out in a sigh.

“Looks like a frog being dissected,” I said.

Five turned. “What?”

“The lines in the marble behind me,” I said. “Just looks like a frog being dissected, is all. I remember those science experiments we did as kids, when Diego threw up at the thought of dissecting some poor –…”

There was a raspy scratch in my throat that choked me and I realised dumbly that I was suddenly thirsty as if never before had I known water and I wanted it more than anything. It was dryness in my mouth and a mean throbbing ache which flared in my throat and worsened the more that I noticed it. I ran my hand from jaw to chest like it might tell me what was happening and why I had not felt it until that very second, when my eyes flit around the lobby for anything that could quench it – and _quench_ really was the only word for it, because it flared and burned and licked at me like fire.

Five seemed paler than me and I wondered if this was the colour draining from the room like it had done in the apocalypse, when there would be flutters in my chest and clouds would swirl red and purple and sick-lime green. But it was him and only him who became pale and worried and he rounded the coffee-table to crouch in front of me. His hands slipped from his pockets and found mine.

“Astrid, are you okay?”

“I’m –…” I paused and tilted my head. “I’m thirsty.”

His face was blank and uncomprehending. “Thirsty?” he repeated.

I had frightened him, I realised. I had reignited a dormant terror in him that I would disappear, fade into the whiteness of this hideous building and not return this time. I was sitting in front of him, in my body, and still he could not let himself believe that we had made it back and that we would change things and I would not abandon him this time around.

“I wasn’t thirsty at all but now –… Now it kinda _hurts_.”

Five stood and turned his head to the secretary. “Hey,” he called loudly.

She flinched as if he had struck her and peeped at him from behind the large screen of her computer. “Yes?”

“You got a water fountain or something around here?”

She blinked at his blunt tone. “Um, we have a water-cooler. Down the hall,” she answered slowly. “To your left.”

Five nodded and dismissed her entirely as if she were merely a prop on his stage. His mood had not been softened; his leg bounced madly in place. I stood from the sofa and smoothed down my skirt. Then I pecked his cheek and the rhythmic thump of his foot against hard tiles stilled for just a moment before it started again.

“Wait for me, Five.”

“Seems that’s all I do.”

There had been spite in his tone and I studied him carefully. “Please, Five,” I said. “We need this, so just – please just let me do the talking.”

Reluctantly, that scowl on his face weakened and he nodded again, one brief and curt nod that worried me, but I had that rasping need digging into the lining of my throat. I walked down that hall.

Before I turned left, I glanced back and found that he was still watching me.

▬

The water-cooler gurgled; my cup became damp and clammy in my hand, filling itself with such slowness that I felt forced to plop it atop the cooler and awkwardly bend down to drink directly from the stream. Droplets slid down my cheeks and soaked my collar and I thought I would never again be without thirst because it was so intense. I had not had anything to drink since stepping back into my body.

One woman rolling a cart of folders paused beside me. “Are you all right, honey?”

I cut off the stream of water and wiped my cuff against my mouth, something that would have sparked fury in my father but which only furrowed her brows in concern.

“The last time I was anywhere near all right, I was thirteen-years-old,” I said.

The woman pursed her lips and looked down at the folders in her cart. “Tell me about it,” she sighed.

▬

Carrying another cup of water, I turned back into the lobby and took another mouthful while looking across the room for Five. I swallowed at the sight of him with his fists snarled in the lab-coat of a pudgy man flushed a light red from how hard Five gripped him. Perhaps Five sensed me, because he shoved the man away from him and fixed his collar, his eyes flashing to mine.

I left the cup aside and marched for the elevator. He had wasted our first chance at figuring out where the eyeball had come from, because the man was already whispering in a strained, choked sputter to his secretary and I figured we were about to be thrown out of this building no matter what.

I waited for the elevator and he stepped into place beside me. The doors opened. Together we walked inside and he stabbed at the button for the ground floor and the elevator shuddered downward in its descent. He waited for me to say something and each second was counted in the ticking of those golden numbers overhead.

He broke first and said, “I know I messed that up a little.”

“I told you to wait for me.”

Beneath his breath, he said, “Like I do anything else.”

There was a knotted ball in my throat which stemmed the lashing anger which was festering beneath it. I wanted to remain calm and rational but it was frothing in me to snap at him like he snapped at me. I touched the folded paper in my pocket which he had written for me and which brought some comfort in brushing its fuzzed, crinkled edges from where it had been crushed against the lining.

“You already said that.” I dared look at him. “Remember?”

“Between the two of us, I’m not the one who has trouble remembering anything, Astrid.”

“Why do you keep blaming me for this memory loss when all I ever did was follow you!” I turned to look at him fully. “I _followed_ you, Five. I left my body behind. I lost just as much as you if not _more_ –…”

He scoffed and shook his head, cheeks dimpled by his mocking smile. “Is that right? You tell me what I lost. You tell me what _I_ remember.”

The reflections of him in the mirrors of the elevator seemed to separate and some looked away while others kept staring at me and even if I understood that none of that was possible, I still felt picked apart from all sides, picked and picked like a crusted scab ripped from a sore.

“Nothing? Fine. I’ll tell you. I remember all those days in the apocalypse when you would disappear on me and you would always come back but you always came back a little _less_ – more confused, more afraid. You would ask me where you were until there came a time when you started asking me _who_ you were. I would tell you and you would seem all right for a little while before you disappeared again and when you came back that time, you never asked me where you were or who you were. You asked who _I_ was. Because you had forgotten me.”

The golden numbers ticked and ticked like my pocket-watch once had, their colour wobbling and liquid in my blurred vision.

“You forgot _me_. And I spent the last years of that apocalypse with a stranger who used to ask me if I even _meant_ anything to her,” he continued. “I know what you lost. But don’t ever try to tell me I lost any less, because I lost _you_ , Astrid.”

He kept scratching at me, scratching and scratching with his mouth flashing silver and I asked myself where I had felt this before that it had opened old wounds so easily. I swallowed beaded lumps in my throat, like pearls which lodged themselves in the lining and made it hard to speak. I was not sure what could be said. For once, I was not sure how to speak to Five, the only soul in the world with whom I had always felt most myself; until there was no sense of self left and even then I had stayed with him – _for_ him.

“Scribble that one down in your notepad,” he said finally. “In case you forget it before we even make it to the parking-lot.”

The doors of the elevator opened; the ticking had ended.

The world was quiet and bland because it was a weekday and most people had jobs and families and things that would be lost in the apocalypse a couple of days from now. It had been his mistake to begin with, leaping forward into the future like he did, but it was my mistake to think that walking back through all those imagined doors to reach my body would fix me.

I was smarting from the sting of what he had said and still I could not bring myself to blame him anymore than I could blame myself. The simplicity of it all was that there was no-one to blame. All those things had happened how they had happened and there was nothing more to be done about it.

He swept through the revolving doors and walked toward our car in the sea of others. He kicked at a stone and it cracked against the bumper of a car nearby and stole me from the dream-world that I had been walking in, my head snapping upward to look at him. We had never been apart, not really, not in all those decades. It had to have been stirring in him all this time, that resentment.

But knowing that did nothing to soothe the ache that wedged itself like a stone into the sole of my foot and pressed hard into my skin with each step that I took toward him, when I rounded the car and then wrapped my arms around him and buried my face against his chest.

“I’m here, Five,” I said gently. “I’m not going anywhere. Do you trust me?”

He said nothing, but his arms curled around me and he clung tight, like he could hold me there and ensure that I would not fade again, that I would not melt into wisps of smoke that fogged up my memories as much as it did the rest of me.

Whispered into the hollow just beneath my ear, he answered, “I trust you.”

▬

Pulling into the alleyway beside the house, we spotted an ill-dressed stranger trawling through the dumpster, tossing sopping strips of cardboard and metal cans onto the ground. Both of us leaned forward in our seats, our faces scrunched as we squinted, because there was something about the black-rimmed coat which seemed more and more familiar to us, though it was now matted with raw, dripping wet patches from rubbing against the sides of the dumpster.

At the exact same moment, we said, “ _Klaus_?”

He turned his head as if he had heard us and waved.

On his left cheek was, something dark and slimy and he peeled it off, though black smudges remained. He wiped them with his hand and then licked it like he wanted to figure out what it was. I gagged and reached for the handle of my door, not wanting to witness another second of Klaus in his natural habitat. But I heard no movement from Five and paused to look at him. His head was tilted, his eyes alight.

He asked, “Do you think Klaus could pass for a functioning adult?”

I turned to look at Klaus through the windshield. He had found a bra buried in the trash and was holding it against his chest, cupping the padding and bouncing around in the squelching wetness of the dumpster. He looked down and let out a delighted gasp, reaching out for a white clump that he put on his head. I realised, with another squint, that it was a mop whose brush had been lost in the dumpster and he wore it like a wig.

“I think the question is more if Klaus can function in general.”

“Good point,” he noted drily. “I could bring him to MeriTech and let him ask about the eyeball. They might take him more seriously than a _kid_.”

Klaus slipped on something, flailed his arms in an attempt to catch himself but disappeared behind the rim of the dumpster with a resounding thump.

I glanced at Five. “Well, it might work. But make him take a shower first.”

Five smiled tiredly. “Now you’re just asking for the impossible,” he said. “Do you think it would be better if you went with him instead?”

“Oh, no. You’re not shirking this on me. Your idea – you bring him.”

Klaus emerged from the dumpster, yelping triumphantly. He held his arm aloft and showed one glistening slice of pizza, its toppings evidently having been shorn when it was thrown into the garbage. I stared, wide-eyed.

“No, Klaus,” Five groaned. “Don’t –…”

Klaus folded the pizza and shoved it into his mouth.

Five slumped forward and rested his forehead against the wheel. “Hopeless,” he said. “Utterly hopeless.”

I patted his shoulder. “Good luck, Five.”

“Wait, wait.” He stuck his hand in my pocket and pulled out my notepad, hastily flipping it open to a fresh page and using the pencil to scribble down an address. “Meet me here at eight.”

I scanned his writing. I folded the paper and tucked it into my pocket. “What for?”

“Well, we both lost a lot,” he said. “’Bout time we found something.”

Again, I felt bold and daring and leaned forward to press my lips against his. I pulled back quickly, cheeks aflame. There was a harsh bang and I looked away from him, watching Klaus wrestle with a cord that had tied itself around his legs.

“Fate of the world rests on Klaus finding out who owned that eyeball, you know,” I said.

“You’re a good kisser,” Five said.

I turned an even darker shade of pink. “Are you making fun of me? Because I don’t even know what I’m doing,” I said.

“Exactly.” His lips quirked. “It’s cute.”

I slammed my door shut and went straight for the house, ignoring Klaus’ calls to check out the tins of paint he had found, tearing off their crusted lids and then mumbling, “I don’t think that’s paint in there –…”

▬

The house creaked in bleating groans of dust and old wood, its long halls like the veins and its entrance like the lungs which swirled with the fresh air blown in from the street. Gently I closed the door behind me and pulled off the black scarf from around my throat, wrapping it on the stand in the hall. I looked around for a moment, searching for a sense of _home_ but understanding that _home_ had been left in the alleyway, sitting in that old car with its clammy windows and busted heater.

I trailed upstairs toward my bedroom but paused atop the staircase, eyes drawn toward my mother sitting in front of those paintings with embroidery in her hands. She was holding the ballerina that I had stitched so many years ago; her tutu spiked with jagged edges from my lack of experience with thread and needle, her arms wobbly and stuck at odd angles.

“I always loved this ballerina,” she told me, though her cool and blank eyes looked through me at a woman in a painting much like herself, stuck in oil and frames. She patted the spot beside her and I sat, leaning my head against her shoulder. I breathed the floral scent of her. “You really ought to finish that present you were making for Diego, honey.”

“I missed you, Mom.”

“I was waiting right here for you, silly,” she tutted. “You were late for our embroidery lesson.”

“Lost my pocket-watch,” I said. “I lost track of time.”

“Little astronaut.” She smiled and kissed my hair. “Did you lose your spaceship too?”

“I lost a lot of things,” I said. “Five helps me find them.”

Even in its fractured state, my memory sketched the paintings before I had even really looked at them, held in their golden frames, untouched in the sixteen years that had passed in the house and the forty which had passed in me. The women in their paintings watched me like they always had done and kept their hands primly clasped on their laps, lips always pale and rarely smiling. I remembered them all. I had forgotten Five, once. But not the paintings.

“You should change your shoes,” she said. “Your socks are all wet from the rain. I told you to keep your coat buttoned all the way to the top.”

There was nothing wrong with my shoes and nothing wrong with my socks, either. I wore no coat. I felt a warmth on my cheeks and wiped tears that I had not felt coming until they ran along my throat and touched my collar. I pulled the embroidery from her hands and placed it beside me, taking my notepad from my pocket and unfolding a new, blank page. She smiled like Delores did while she watched me, with lips held in a curve that suggested happiness but which never showed in her eyes; eyes which, once more like Delores, seemed to have only been painted there to resemble something human but which never quite succeeded in doing so.

“You can write something, Mom. How about my name? Then you’ll remember that I came back.”

Her hand wrapped limply around the pencil that I pushed against her palm. She looked down and marvelled at it like it was something foreign and new to her. She tilted it, then held its tip against he page. She drew the wobbling line down through the margin like a slash. I watched it and felt as if its tip had slit through me instead because there was something wrong with her hand – it jerked, it twitched mechanically. She could not write like she had before with flourishing swirls and dots.

She began to draw the second half of the letter _A_ and this line was even more malformed, for it had jagged bumps where her hand had seemed to lose control of itself and shudder forward. It was a much longer line than the first had been and she finished it with one hard slash between the sloping yawn of the letter which was meant to connect them but neither end touched the surrounding lines. I waited for her to write the rest of my name but she did nothing.

“There,” she said. “Should I write something else, darling?”

The notepad slid from her hand and I took it gently from her, closing its cover. “No,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“You seem pale.” She tilted her head. “Pogo tells me you’re doing very well in your lessons but perhaps I should talk to him about slowing down a little. It might be making you ill, all that astral business.”

It was hard to speak. Through the tightness of my throat, I pushed out a meagre, “Yeah, maybe.”

Behind me, I heard the floorboards shift and groan and I turned quickly to notice Luther at the other end of the hall where he could still hear and see us, his face stricken with sadness. I stood, somehow flush with a sudden embarrassment not unlike what I had felt in the elevator with Five. I roughly smeared my cuffs against my cheeks to wipe away those tears.

“I didn’t know you were home,” he said awkwardly. “I was just heading out. I – uh, I won’t bother you –…”

The hall was sullen and black behind him, hidden from the sunlight which filled the mezzanine, brushing the sides of his cropped hair enough to turn it golden but otherwise leaving his tall frame shrouded. It made him seem lopsided and awkward in a way that he never had been when we were children, sheepishly scooting toward the staircase as if I might leap out and assault him if he came any closer.

I suspected, though, that it was my wet and ruddy cheeks that bothered him more than the fact that we had argued last time we saw each other and still had not made up. I was useless at holding in tears and Luther was useless at holding back his discomfort when he saw them.

“Can I come with you?”

Luther paused. “What?”

“I asked if you would let me come with you.”

“You don’t even know where I’m going.” He tried to seem a little more playful and puffed up his chest. “I could be going back to the moon for all you know.”

I smiled weakly. “I would love nothing more than to visit the moon with you right now, Luther.”

“That bad, huh? All right. I’m going to see Diego.”

From behind me, my mother sighed and said, “Pogo is pushing Astrid far too hard in those lessons. I really ought to talk to him. That astral stuff makes her so terribly run-down. She’s too pale.”

Luther straightened his shoulders, his brows knitting together. “Astrid, are you feeling sick?”

“We can talk in the car,” I said. “Would you wait for me if I just grab a fresh shirt? I slept in this one and I feel gross.”

“Klaus could learn from you,” Luther called after me. “I’m pretty sure he’s been wearing the same shirt for four days now! He needs an intervention for, like, at least _three_ things by now so maybe we could plan one big intervention and combine them all?”

“Great,” I replied loudly. “You can start brainstorming.”

▬

In my bedroom, I pulled on a clean shirt which held the lavender scent of our detergent. I was rushing, afraid that Luther would disappear without me though he usually kept to his word. It was Klaus who used to tell me he would wait and then disappeared, drawn off by one distraction or another. I was flicked down my collar and noticed the glint of a fallen bracelet stuck beneath my drawers and I grasped it gently, noticing its broken clasp.

I frowned, placing it back inside the jewellery-box where it had been when I left the house years beforehand.

“Luther?”

I yelled loud enough that I soon heard his clunking footsteps and found him filling the doorway to my room, seeming rushed as if he had thought I was in some sort of trouble. He had not shed his old mantle of Number One and old habits died hard, especially for him. His eyes drifted toward the bracelets and he winced.

“What happened to my stuff?” I asked. “Some of my bracelets are missing and this one is broken.”

“I think you should talk to Klaus about that.”

“He borrowed them?”

Luther seemed hesitant to answer and it showed in his pained expression. “He sold them,” he mumbled. “Some of them, anyway.”

The broken end of the bracelet seemed to cut into my palm from how hard I pressed it in my grip. I looked down at it and heaved a hoarse, shuddering sigh which rippled through me and wore me out. I threw the bracelet aside and heard it lash against my radiator. Luther tentatively stepped into the bedroom and lowered himself to a crouch, attempting to sit beside me but violently bumping his long legs against my drawers. Some slipped out of place and both of us quickly reached to steady the books and pencils and earrings scattered on my dresser, because Luther sat down and the room seemed to vibrate with the force behind it.

“Sorry,” he said sheepishly, dropping beside me.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Didn’t knock over anything important, anyway.”

“Not that, Astrid.” His shoulder pressed against mine, our backs resting against the end of my bed. “I meant about Klaus. About all of it.”

“Not your fault. Besides, I wanted to apologise to you too.”

“For what?”

“Leaving before I could really explain that I didn’t kill the old man, Luther.”

He swallowed. “You’ve been hanging around Five too much. ‘ _The old man_ ’? Five says that.”

“I don’t consider him my father. Pogo was more of a father to me. Fathers don’t treat you like child-soldiers and send you out to fight their wars. Reginald was – …”

“Oh, you’re calling him Reginald instead? Much better.”

“Luther, he was a cruel, bitter man –…”

“Don’t talk like that.” His eyes had hardened. “Diego talks like that. He gave us everything, Astrid.”

“And he _stole_ even more,” I said. “I had a lot more time to think about it than you, you know. Children are meant to be protected and loved – none of us were. We needed a name for him and he needed one for us. Father did fine. But I don’t owe him the _meaning_ of the word. He made us fight each other – made us _hurt_ each other.”

My eyes drifted toward the bracelet on the ground, broken and sparking dull gold.

“Guess we never got out of the habit.” I waited until he turned his head to look at me. “When did Klaus do it, then?”

Luther sighed and scrubbed his hand against his short, bristly hair. “Well, things went downhill fast after Ben died. We had already lost you and Five. As soon as we were of age, Diego left pretty much immediately and Klaus went right after him, along with Vanya. Klaus came back a week later, telling us he’d forgotten something but Allison caught him going through our rooms. Hell, even when Dad died, Klaus was already trying to find stuff to sell. But I guess when he stole your stuff, it was a little harder to forgive. Diego heard about it through Allison and really lost it. Klaus was lucky he’d already left the house before Diego could get a hold of him.”

I nodded and looked down at my lap. “Sounds like things were pretty bad here.”

“You see why I liked it better on the moon.” He bumped his shoulder against mine and tried to grin, though it was short-lived. “I guess there wasn’t anything for us to hold onto, in the end. There was so much resentment. Klaus was getting into heavier stuff than before and Allison had dreams she wanted to follow and Diego couldn’t let you go.”

“Let me go?”

“Losing you was different than losing Five, Astrid.” He rubbed at a spot of mud on his boots. “Five vanished and it hurt more than you could imagine to think he was gone. But you were _here_. Physically, anyway. You were in the next room. Hell, I could hear those damn machines from my room –…”

He stopped and let out another sigh, one that brought down his broad shoulders and deflated him.

“I was a coward,” he said simply. “I avoided your room because I was afraid to see you. You were right.”

“Right about what?”

“That I’m the worst brother you could have asked for.”

I could not remember ever saying that and it welled in me again, the loneliness and sadness of losing myself, again and again until I had been bitten away into something different, like a cliffside eroded by the sea. I felt as if I was rocketing back down to Earth in the kind of shuttle that Luther must have used, its panels ripping off – and there it was again, the sense that I had seen something like that before but could not pull together the smeared pieces of what had once been a whole memory. I thought about all that we had done to get here, even if I could not recall every little detail and I started to laugh and shifted onto my knees to hug him.

“Luther,” I said, “if you only knew how long I’ve waited to see you – if you knew how damn _much_ I wanted to be here with you – you would never think like that ever again.”

I pulled back and saw his old puppy-like confusion. “That fight we had in the kitchen,” he said, “when you wanted to find Five and I accidentally broke your pocket-watch when I pushed you too hard. You told me –…”

“I was a kid,” I interrupted. “I said stupid stuff like kids do sometimes. Don’t tell me you held onto that this whole time, Luther.”

“If I hadn’t broken the watch,” he said, “maybe you could have found your way home. Pogo kept telling me that the watch wasn’t important, that you were too far from your body to return like you normally would but I knew it was my fault, Astrid.”

“Oh, please.” I scoffed and sank back onto the floor. “You’re doing it again.”

“Doing _what_?”

“Being Number One. Blaming yourself, punishing yourself. Things happen, Luther. _Mistakes_ happen. You really think I spent the last forty years resenting you for an argument I barely remember? I mean, don’t you think if I hated you that much I wouldn’t be sitting here beside you right now? If you forgive me, I’ll forgive you.”

“So…you aren’t mad that I never visited you when you were –…”

He trailed off, seemingly unable to say the word.

“Comatose,” I finished for him. “No. If I had been the other way around and it was you in that room, I think I would feel just as afraid to see you in that state. How could I blame you for that?”

“Diego did,” he said. “Allison did too, in her own way. Never said the words aloud but I know she did.”

“You know how Diego can be,” I replied gently. “And Allison…Well, she has her own way of dealing with things. But I want you to know that the pocket-watch couldn’t have brought me back.”

He unfolded the left-hand flap of his coat and rummaged around, pulling out a broken chain linked to a broken pocket-watch that he placed in my hand. I brushed my thumb across its shattered front and smiled at its worn, scuffed casing and tangled chain. It was the same one that I had broken.

“Yeah. I guess somewhere along the line I accepted that was true but I couldn’t bring myself to let it go,” he explained awkwardly. “And maybe it just made me feel a little better to know that I had it. Especially when I was up there by myself and I knew I had this one piece of you with me.”

He had looked at the world for so long that now he stood on its soil, he felt like an alien who had come down in his spaceship to speak with the creatures he had examined for so long from his fort on the moon.

“Little astronaut,” I mumbled to myself.

Softly I tapped at his shoulder to make him look at me again and pushed it into his hands.

“You should keep it,” I said.

“No. No, it’s yours –…”

“Whenever I was upset or sad, I used to rub the front of this watch,” I interrupted. “And it would make me feel just that little bit better. When Pogo first gave it to me, I thought it was because there was some kind of magic in it that made me happier, because it seemed to work every time. Or maybe it was what I told myself because the reality was a little more boring. Though if you felt the same comfort in it, maybe I wasn’t so wrong after all.”

I made him hold it, pulling down his fingers around it.

“You should keep it. Please, Luther. You looked after it for me all these years. Couldn’t you look after it a little bit longer for me?”

He tucked it back into his coat. “I guess even if it’s broken, it’s still right twice a day.”

I snorted. “Good one. You sure everyone left because they hated the Academy or because they hated your lousy jokes?”

He feigned offense. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Everyone likes my jokes.”

“Yeah, right.”

Standing from my spot, I held out a hand to help him up. He glanced at it and shook his head.

“I appreciate the sentiment, Astrid, but I’d probably squeeze too hard and break your hand.”

I rolled my eyes. “Fine, fine.”

He pushed himself up on his own, one hand pressed down on my bed and the other on my desk. He struggled for a moment, gave himself one hard shove which resulted in him standing while the wooden frame of my bed cracked loudly and broke, its wooden rows breaking off and falling to the floorboards below. His eyes widened and he swallowed, fully upright and fixing his coat.

“We could stop at a furniture store after we see Diego,” he said lamely.

I sighed and walked toward the door, shaking my head.

“Good thing I didn’t take your hand after all, right? Could be visiting the emergency room instead. Right, Astrid?”

“Just bring the car around front, Luther.”

I went downstairs and put on the scarf again. I looked at my notepad and stared at the first butchered letter of my name, smoothing my thumb against its harsh, wonky lines. I pulled the pencil from its holder and turned back to the page where I had written my own points to remember and crossed off another from my list.

_Tell Luther that you did not kill Dad – also make amends with Luther._

I read the next line and pursed my lips, head cocked while I considered it.

_Ask Klaus to take a shower._

Shrugging, I crossed it off and wrote underneath it: _asked by proxy_ – _unlikely to succeed._

▬

The car trundled toward me, slowing against the curb and violently rocking to a complete stop. In the front, Luther sat contorted around the wheel with his long legs hunched up against his chest, his broad shoulders rounded in a painful bend. The bumper scraped the asphalt on his side and when I sat inside, I slid down the leather seats and bumped against his shoulder because his weight had left the old car lopsided on his end. He smiled apologetically at me and pulled off again, clumsily pushing at the pedals beneath his boots.

“Pretty tiny car. Hard to see down there,” he mumbled.

I nodded and slumped back in my seat for one blissful second before the car shuddered in harsh tremors at the traffic-lights, the seat-belt cutting against my chest when I was thrown forward. I stared Luther down and he meekly reached to turn on the radio, tuning it and then raising its volume. He sucked in his cheeks, then blew them out in a raspberry and tapped at the wheel, though he could not quite follow the rhythm of the song on the radio.

I said, “Maybe I should drive –…”

Immediately he cut in. “You should drive – yup, good idea – I agree –…”

I rolled my eyes and waited for him to climb out before I shuffled to his side and took the wheel. He came around the car and tried to bend down to sit where I had been but bashed his skull against the roof and battered his arm against the door. Eventually, he plopped down and slammed the door shut.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

I tried to reach for the pedals and realised I was a little bit too short, barely able to press down hard enough. Luther drew in another breath and bit down on his tongue, holding in a laugh.

“Don’t,” I warned.

“Maybe it was a bad idea to switch.”

I glared at him. “Reginald made us take driving lessons when we were ten years old and I could reach the damn pedals then!”

“Yeah, but we weren’t driving this car, this one has – …”

I forced my foot down and the car jumped forward, then rolled back again.

“I have it,” I said through gritted teeth. “Five isn’t much taller than me and _he_ seemed to reach the pedals just fine in the other car.”

My eyes shot to Luther.

“You better not tell him about this,” I said.

He made a motion of zipping his lips. “Scout’s honour.”

“Good. Because I think I’ve got it. Forty years without a body means I’m a little rusty with these things.”

“Oh, sure, absolutely.”

“I got the best marks in those driving lessons.”

“Actually I think Ben got one point higher than you based on Dad’s system –…”

I stared him down and he pressed his lips together.

“But like you said, forty years without your body,” he added. “You’ll get back into the swing of things.”

“Oh, don’t patronise me, Luther Hargreeves. _I’m_ the older one here, don’t you forget that.”

He nodded and lowered in his seat. He pursed his lips and fiddled with his hands before he reached out to switch channels on the radio. He went back and forth between one song and another and finally settled on a pop song whose lyrics I remembered in patches. I picked my brain apart trying to remember why the singer seemed so familiar and then it came to me – it was Cyndi Lauper.

Five had mentioned finding recordings of Luther singing along to this very song. I eyed him warily. He strummed the rhythm on his jeans, bobbing his head to the tune but otherwise he left the singing to Lauper.

“You know, Astrid,” he said suddenly, “I’m glad you asked to come with me.”

I smiled, turning onto another street. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. I feel a lot better about my driving now that I see yours.”

The car jolted and stopped, my foot slipping. Luther opened his mouth and I held my hand up.

“Not one word or I tell everyone about those Cyndi Lauper tapes.”

He stayed silent for the rest of the drive.

▬

Luther directed me to the parking lot of a rundown gym in a dark, glum side of town. I parked awkwardly, the car turned at an angle. I tossed the keys at Luther, ignoring his worried frown because of the bright orange signs warning us about fines for taking that spot. I shrugged off his concern and walked ahead of him. He caught up quickly and kept his stride short enough that we could stick together.

We made an odd pair with his mammoth height compared to my thirteen-year-old shortness. Luther also had an awkwardness to him that made him stand out, his gangly limbs seeming unattached to him, always forgetting his stature until he had to duck under a door or make himself less intimidating for those who barely reached his chest.

He spoke with a man who rested against the ropes and I trailed toward the counter, taking in the cluttered layer of posters pinned beside it. There was a man wrapping his hands beside them and he glanced at me, seeming to find something amusing about my uniform and perhaps my height, because he glanced from my shoes to my eyes and shook his head, snorting. It annoyed me and I slipped my hands in my pockets, intending to walk away from him.

“Looking to box, princess? Might get hurt, you know.”

“I’m looking to box someone in particular right about now,” I said. “Wanna place a bet?”

He grinned even more and held out his hand for me to shake but before I could, Luther appeared, grasping my shoulder and steering me the other way.

“She’s not here to box,” he said. “We’re just looking for somebody.”

“You should consider boxing yourself, buddy,” the man replied. “A guy your size would do great.”

“He’s not allowed to box anymore,” I said, adding sweetness and a smile. “Not after the last guy he killed in the ring. Severe head trauma after the first hit. Stood no chance of survival. Though you _were_ offering to fight, weren’t you? What do you think, Luther? Would you like to try it out just one more time?”

The man had paled and craned his neck to look at Luther. “Oh, it’s all right – got a fight booked tonight already –…”

“What a shame.” I cocked my head and smiled even more widely. “Another time, then.”

Luther gripped my shoulder a little tighter and nodded at the man. “Come on, Astrid,” he said.

He pushed me toward a narrow, dingy hall lit in a flickering green light. It was damp and festered with the rotten odour of sweat and grease. There was a few steps ahead of us and I went first, though at the bottom step, I stopped and turned to face Luther.

“He was being an asshole,” I said. “You should have let me do one round.”

Luther seemed flustered but amused all the same. “You have an advantage, Astrid. Wouldn’t be a fair fight, would it?”

“Who gives a damn about fair? He called me _princess_.” I hopped off the step and leaned against the wall, my nose scrunched in disgust. “Princess. No-one ever calls me that.”

Luther passed me out and went toward a small door at the end of the hall. “Maybe not to your face,” he said under his breath. “Forget it, Astrid. We have more important things to worry about. This is where Diego lives, apparently.”

Trailing behind Luther into the room, I heard the low rumble of what seemed to be a boiler somewhere and the vents rattled too. The room was as dark as the hall had been with only thin, rectangular windows placed so high on the walls that the light was watered down and weak before it could reach the concrete floor. There was a bed tucked against the wall furthest from where we stood, slowly taking the last steps down into his room. His walls were plastered with posters, one of which showed he had been fighting the night that Reginald was killed.

Luther stared at it, his eyes unreadable.

“You were wrong. Diego didn’t do it either. I told you.”

“Yeah, I got that much, thanks,” he muttered.

Luther paused and stooped low to look at something in a frame. He started rummaging around but I stepped into his place and stared at the embroidered knives, held within a border that I had never finished, with the name DIEGO stitched underneath and I reached to touch it. He had framed it.

Luther glanced at me, his mouth pursed again as if he had something that he wanted to ask but which he left unspoken. Instead he pulled open the drawers, rifling between old books and worn throwing knives.

“Luther, leave his stuff alone.”

He held up a clump of drawings which turned translucent against the light. I saw the finger-painted sketches of flowers and stars with shaky lines holding them together. I recognised them as the paintings I had made for Diego a long, long time ago and which I had assumed would be buried in an old, forgotten room in the house where we usually stuffed old, forgotten things to collect dust and wither.

“Put them back,” I said.

Luther studied me for a moment and nodded, returning them to the drawer with more delicacy than he had had when taking them out. He took the only chair in the room and it creaked beneath him, threatening to collapse, but it held steady and he seemed to relax against it. I wandered around a little more, noting all the posters in his room, stamped between warning signs about the boiler and vents.

I sat on the bed and thought about those clumsy drawings I had made as a child. I used to paint silly things like drooping dandelions and dogs with fat rounded bodies, their legs mere sticks poking from their stomachs, tails curled and tongues flopping out in one thick slash of pink. I would add meaningless spirals and dots and all sorts of colourful hearts and I would bring them to Diego like they were the kind of paintings my mother admired in the hall.

And he would treat them like they were those paintings in the hall; something worth admiring, something worth loving.

“Astrid?”

I blinked. Luther was watching me and I cleared my throat, overcome with emotion. “Yeah?”

“Should we…I don’t know, play ‘ _I Spy_ ’ to pass the time or something?”

The rush of emotion dwindled and I found myself trying to find words beginning with _P_.

▬

Laying on my stomach, face firmly pressed into the pillows, I sensed a blooming scream building in me at the hum that Luther let out as he looked around the room. He glanced between the three bare pipes, the weeping mold slithering down the walls and the hazardous labels peeling from the door. I did not need to look at Luther to _know_ that he was doing this because he had been doing the same thing for the last hour whenever it was my turn.

“Lamp? No? Huh. Lightbulb?”

“Christ, Luther, there are three things starting with an ‘ _L_ ’ in this room and you’ve already knocked off two of them,” I groaned.

“Locker!”

I lifted my head and smacked it back down against the pillow. “Yes! Finally. How did you miss that?”

“I thought it was too easy.”

“Easier than ‘ _lamp_ ’?”

“Okay, my turn. Let me think.”

He looked between the pipes, the mold and the labels. I wilted against the bed again and sighed. The room was quiet until there was a sharp whistling sound which sliced through the air and ended with a harsh thud, the tip of the knife embedded into the wooden drawers beside where Luther sat. He clutched his cheek in pain. I stood immediately, astral energy swirling in my hands because I was afraid that the Commission had sent another agent after us and Luther had been injured already. I stood in front of him and watched that door which opened a fraction more.

Stepping into the light, Diego shoved his knives back into their belt with a sharp click and the astral energy in my hands fizzled out. I sat back down on the edge of the bed while he took the few steps down into the room, tearing off his gloves and raising an eyebrow at me.

“What are you doing here, Astrid?”

“Uh, _hello._ I’m here too,” Luther grumbled. “You could have killed me!””

“If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”

With his usual discomfort, Luther stood and tried to seem more friendly. “It’s a nice place,” he said.

“Though lacking enough furniture for a real game of ‘ _I, Spy_ ’.”

Luther shot me a glare before he focused on Diego, a more sombre mood simmering between them. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were fighting the night Dad died?”

“Well, I shouldn’t have to prove my innocence to you or anyone else in this family.”

“I know,” Luther said. “I just thought –…”

“I know what you thought. Now, you have a nice day, brother.”

Diego strode across the room and crumpled up the poster, tearing it down from the wall. He stared Luther down. I worried that they would start another fight and wondered if I would need to put a shield between them. I thought the room was much too cramped and small, too, so that Diego would probably lose what little he had in here. Yet it was Luther who moved first, heading for the door. He stilled at the steps, glancing back at me.

“Are you coming, Astrid?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Just give me a few minutes.”

Luther nodded and remained where he was.

“I meant give me a few minutes in _here_ while you wait _outside_ , Luther.”

He flushed and nodded again. “Got it,” he said awkwardly, lumbering up the steps and leaving through the hall.

Diego watched that spot where Luther had been as if he was still there in front of him, his shoulders tense until he heard the distant clatter of another door swinging shut. Only then did he loosen up and sigh, taking the spot beside me on the bed.

“What _are_ you doing here, Astrid?”

“I wanted to see you,” I explained. “Just so happened Luther did too.”

“So that was his car parked outside, huh? He did a terrible job. Parked in two spaces. I didn’t think Luther was that bad a driver,” he whistled.

I nodded sympathetically. “Yeah. I guess he finds it hard to hit the pedals, you know. Given his size and all.”

Diego shrugged. He skimmed his eyes over me and he asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” I noticed his doubt and snorted. “I’m _fine_ , Diego. Quit worrying.”

“You know, it isn’t every day someone wakes up from a coma. I think I’m allowed to worry.”

There was a lightness in his tone that did not match his eyes, which seemed a darker shade of brown than I remembered. But then there was no point in comparing him to what I could remember when those details were so smudged and faded like those finger-paintings in his drawers and I felt a heaviness in my chest because Diego had never lied to me like I wanted to lie to him then. I wanted him to believe that I really was fine, but he would find out himself, he would notice little things and he would think that I did not trust him enough.

It would hurt him if I lied and so I said, “I told you that I was here – that I was alive.”

He hardly moved. Then, he breathed out and shook his head, a small smile on his lips. “I _knew_ I was right. I _knew_ you were communicating with me.”

“I made it back for only a few seconds,” I said. “I tried to use a pocket-watch and it didn’t work. I couldn’t do anything more than blink.”

He ran his hand down his face and wiped that smile into a pained grimace. His eyes were wet, glistening in the pale blue light which filtered from the bulb strung over his sink. “They kept telling me it was an involuntary reaction,” he croaked. “And that coma patients – they move and blink and make noises all the time but it doesn’t _mean_ anything.”

“Who told you?”

“Pogo, Mom.” He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and drew me close to his chest. “But I told them you were in there. I told you them you’d find a way back to us.”

“Took me long enough,” I said, words muffled by his shirt. I drew back. “Diego, I need to tell you something that might be difficult to hear.”

He braced himself, his face turning to stone and his hands gnarled in his lap as if he was already awaiting the first punch in another boxing match. “What is it?”

“I know Five told you about the apocalypse,” I started. “But did he tell you anything about me while we were there?”

“No,” Diego answered flatly. “He didn’t.”

“I was all right in the beginning,” I said. “I couldn’t touch anything in my astral form, but I was otherwise fine. But then I started having some problems. I disappeared a lot and I’m not sure what happened to me. Five told me that my astral form would just vanish. The first time I disappeared on him, it was because I used a watch to come back – that was when I saw you. But every other time that I disappeared, it wasn’t because I was trying. There was just something – something _wrong_ with me.”

Diego sat straighter; his jaw was locked. The boiler bubbled behind him, an oddly comforting sound in the emptiness of his room.

“After that, I started to lose my memory.” I toyed with my fingers. “It got so bad that I couldn’t even remember _Five_.”

He swallowed thickly. “And now?”

“Now I’m…I’m not sure. I can remember better than I could before. I use a little notepad –…” I took it out and put it in his hands – “…and I write most stuff down in case I forget and – and I have some problems with my senses, almost like everything is delayed. I don’t always feel things right away. It’s like my mind can’t seem to reconnect to my body and so they’re not in sync just yet. But the notepad is the only thing that –…”

He looked so horrified that my words trailed off and a red-hot embarrassment prickled at my throat again. I regretted having told him and wished that I left with Luther and it was such a sudden rush of wishing I had left that I stood and took the notepad from him. 

“Luther’s probably waiting,” I said. “I should go now.”

“What you should do is sit back down, Astrid.”

Taking in his stern expression, I did what he told me but perched on the very edge of the bed, prepared to bolt. Gently he took the notepad from me and flipped through its pages. He read the line about Klaus needing a shower and nodded, smiling for the first time in a while.

“It’s temporary,” I mumbled.

“What is?”

“The notepad,” I said. “Just something Five suggested. I plan to talk to Pogo and figure out how we can fix me. If we can fix me. I’ve been unsure about that lately.”

“You don’t need _fixing_ , Astrid. You never did.” He pulled me against him again and pressed a kiss to my temple. “You made it through Hell to get here – literal Hell, if Five was telling us the truth. You should be proud of that. You’re a fighter. We’ll figure this out together. Don’t cry, either. If you go out there crying, the big guy won’t know what to do with himself. You know Luther’s no good with tears. Especially if it’s Allison crying, he freaks out.”

“I already cried in front of him today.”

Diego hesitated. “Was it him who made you cry? Because I’m not afraid to take on that lug no matter how big he got.”

“No,” I scoffed. “Besides, I could take Luther down in a heartbeat, way faster than you could. You know that.”

He mussed up my hair on purpose, grinning when I smacked at his arm. “Oh, I know,” he said. “You always could. Doesn’t mean I still wouldn’t do it for you, though. What were you crying about anyway?”

“I talked to Mom. She seems – forgetful.”

Diego sobered immediately, handing me my notepad which I put back into my pocket. He said, “She has a different…system than you, Astrid. She needs a recharge.”

Both of us knew that that was not fully true but neither of us wanted to admit the alternative. I settled on switching the subject and said, “Luther also told me that Klaus sold some of my stuff.”

Diego stood and undid his belt, tossing it aside. “I tried to get them back,” he muttered. “Went to pawn-shops all over town but most were already sold. I could have killed Klaus that day.”

“They were just bracelets,” I said.

I had been hoping to placate him, but he rounded on me and snapped, “They were _yours_. He got cut off by the old man and his solution was to rob whatever he wanted from the house before he got caught. I know he has his problems but so do the rest of us. He had no _right_ –…”

He stopped himself, casting his eyes to the ground. He walked to his sink and splashed cold water against his face, patting his skin with a cloth he pulled from a nearby railing that he then leaned against to look at me.

“He had no right,” he said again, more calmly. “They were yours.”

The boiler gurgled and the pipes sang.

“We’ll figure this out,” he continued. “The memory loss, the delay between your body and mind, all of it. I mean, Pogo ought to know something.”

“I hope so.” I stood up from the bed. “I really should go, Diego. Luther will freeze his ass off in the parking-lot waiting for me.”

“Serves him right.”

I rolled my eyes and reached out to hug him. “By the way, Diego,” I said lowly, “I’m glad you kept my drawings and my embroidery. We both know Reginald would have tossed them into his fireplace to keep his study warm.”

“Reginald now, huh?” He smiled. “I couldn’t throw away those masterpieces. That drawing of the cat with swirls for whiskers? Genius.”

“Hey, I tried my best to capture that tabby-cat who used to hide out in our alleyway. Now it seems Klaus has taken his spot.”

I walked to the door but looked back when he called my name.

“You can cross out that line in your notepad about apologising to me for leaving. I was angry with you, at first. But I know you did everything you could to get back here. I knew it every Sunday that I sat with you, too.”

“Thanks, Diego.” I grabbed the door-handle. “Oh, by the way – I think I would like Eudora, if you ever feel like introducing me to her.”

He spoke with a hint of humour that was lost on me. “Sure. She loves nothing more than when I surprise her. I’ll see you later, Astrid.”

Shutting the door behind me, I tightened my scarf around my neck and smiled to myself. 

▬

The contrast between the hot, wet air of the gym and the cool crisp air of the night was immediate. I could feel that much but struggled with things like hunger and thirst. Diego had been right that Pogo was probably the only person who might be able to tell what was wrong with me but I held little hope in it. It was strange, what my body could and could not feel and how long it took for it to feel anything at all.

I could sense the brittle chill ruffling its way through my scarf and making me shiver but otherwise I was not hungry and not tired, not thirsty and not sick. It was the absence of those things – it was the absence of remembering how that felt, too, until I felt it so intensely I could not ignore it, like what had happened in MeriTech.

Luther stood in the parking-lot with a balled-up piece of paper in his hands. “I got fined, Astrid,” he called. “For _your_ awful parking job. Do you see this? I got fined!”

I took the paper from him and tossed it away without reading it. He scrambled to grab it, throwing me an offended glare. The world was ending in a few days and it seemed unimportant in comparison.

“I need you to drop me off somewhere. I promised Five I would meet him.”

Luther huffed and clambered into the car, bumping against the wheel and catching his head on the side of the roof again. The car wobbled back and forth with his efforts and I waited until it had stopped before climbing in beside him. I saw his cheek still had a bloodied scratch and I licked my cuff, reaching out to rub at it.

“Not very sanitary, Astrid.”

I laughed. “I’m helping you.”

“Yeah, well, if Diego hadn’t thrown that stupid knife –…”

“You’re both as bad as each other, you know that?” I leaned back and inspected my work. “All better.”

Luther checked himself in the mirror between us, flicking on the cold yellow glow of the light overhead for some clarity. He scrubbed his cheek hard enough for it to flush a pinkish-red colour. He held the wheel but made no effort to turn the key and start the engine, his eyes fixated on the potholes which pockmarked the parking-lot like deep black craters on the moon that he had once known so well.

“Luther?”

He broke out of his daydream and glanced at me. “Sorry. Got distracted.”

“Are you okay?”

He turned on the engine and it hummed like a living, breathing creature had unfurled beneath us. “I’m fine. Where are you meeting Five?”

His eyes met mine and I saw that I was not the only one struggling to readjust to an old life that now seemed foreign and strange.

▬

Glowing acid-blue in the night, the department store looked more like a haunted house than anything. I had Luther bring me a block from here and walked the rest of it alone, glancing around for Number Five. The streets were bare around that store, its parking-lot dotted with three cars, though it seemed the store itself had been shut for at least an hour. Its posters hung limp and dull in the windows; its shopping carts were tucked neatly to one side.

I stood in front of the door and wondered if Five had wanted me to break inside or simply stand around until he appeared, but then I heard the wet smack of shoes against puddles and found him rushing toward me.

“Klaus made me late,” he grumbled. “It worked, by the way.”

I perked up. “You know who owns the eyeball?”

“No.” He took his hands from his pockets. “I meant Klaus getting us far enough to discover who owned it. Problem is, it turns out it hasn’t even been bought yet. We hit a dead end.”

I tried not to show too much disappointment because it was already clear that Five was annoyed, tipping toward another low mood that matched what he had felt this morning. 

“Well,” I said, “at least you got Klaus to function like an adult. He did help after all.”

“Yeah, with blood and glitter on his head.” Five noted my confusion and added, “I’ll fill you in later. For now, let me show you what we came here for. Wait here, I’ll find a way to let you in.”

Mist had begun to shimmer down toward us in white sheets, pricking our dark uniforms in hazy beads that popped and faded, soon replaced. He disappeared into a harsh line of electric blue light, reappearing on the other side of the glass doors and wandering into the aisles where I could no longer see him. I huddled into my sweater and drew my scarf tight around me. There was something eerie about the parking-lot at this time of night, with only the faint figures of strangers passing across the street reminding me that we were not alone in this world.

Stepping through a dark slit of blue, Five landed beside me and noticed how I flinched. “What’s the matter, Astrid? Feeling jumpy?”

“No,” I fibbed. “I just didn’t expect you to be so fast.”

He shrugged off the white lie, perhaps wanting to spare me the embarrassment. “Come on, it’s around the corner.”

▬

The rows upon rows of clothing stood like silken black barriers, seemingly endless, blocking us in from all sides. I loathed the dense scent of the carpet underneath us which muffled our steps; musty and frayed and coated in little tufts of lint from shoes scuffing against it, carts cutting through its strands. Like the paths in our garden, tiled flooring wound through the store and sliced through the sections to separate them from each other, keeping the garish colours of children and babies away from the dull blues and beiges of the suits meant for men across the gulf of a display section.

“I need to find a flashlight,” Five muttered. “It’s too dark to see anything.”

I looked around for a switch or something that we could use but then thought of something a little easier. I used astral energy wrapped around myself like armour and its glow radiated outward enough that we could look a few feet ahead of us.

Five smirked. “That’ll work too.”

There was a small square opening between the railings which showed three mannequins stood together on a stand, posed languidly with their arms folded or held out as if they were caught mid-speech. I glanced at him, cottoning onto what he had wanted to show me when the pale light around me found her in the middle, her eyes as soft and understanding as ever, her lips kind and patient.

“ _Delores_?”

“Figured she might appreciate a visit,” Five said. “I remembered the name of the store. It was on the sign, in the rubble. I knew we’d find her here.”

Tenderly I held out my hand to touch her plum-coloured wig which seemed so bizarre when we had only ever known her without it. It gleaned against the light of my hand. I stepped back and turned, my eyes welling as I looked at Five. He was poised in his usual stance, one hand slipped into his pocket, so casual even though his mouth betrayed him because he began to smile too, one dimple puckering his cheek.

“This is the sweetest thing you have _ever_ done,” I said. “Five, I –…”

Behind him, two black lumps formed against the railings and lifted rifles at us. I rushed forward and knocked him sideways into a large cardboard box labelled CLEARANCE. There was a harsh ringing of bullets peppering the spot where we had been, shooting great clouds of dust and shards of plastic. Collapsing forward from their stand, the three mannequins sprawled across the ground in a pile of broken limbs and shattered faces. I saw Delores, the left half of her face cracked and broken inward. I wanted to run to her, pull her out and hold her.

But we were already scrambling up and running and tripping over each other for the exit. He was gripping my hand, ducking behind each sign and railing before bullets ripped everything to shreds.

We dropped behind a cart and tried to catch our breath. “I’ll make a shield,” I said. “I’ll cover you, you can get to the car.”

“No way.” He found something even in the dark because he squeezed my hand once and crouched, ready to teleport. “We’ll take these bastards down together or not at all. For Delores, right?”

“For Delores,” I repeated. 

“You take one and I take the other,” he said. He peeked over the cart and ducked back down. “Ready?”

I nodded and took the hand he held out to me, helping me stand. He vanished, a portal of echoing blue light floating in place. Slowly I snuck out from between the railings and tried to spot the agents, skimming under the hems of dresses and skirts and jeans in attempt to see their legs. Then it came – one abrupt shot which rang through the store behind me and which missed me by mere inches.

I had that astral energy around me and hardened it into one solid piece of armour, like a suit which covered all of me. Something that the old man – _Reginald_ – had suggested once. I stood and faced the agent who wore a strange mask on their head, shaped like a puppy-dog with flopping ears. I had the sense of being split apart again while looking at them but I had little chance to focus on it because they lifted their rifle and aimed.

One bullet sparked against my chest and another ricocheted off my shoulder and the agent held their fire, seemingly unsure of what to do next. I formed one hard splint of energy in my hand, like the throwing knife that Diego had launched at Luther.

I would never have his kind of accuracy but I liked to think I was good.

The splint shot from my hand and sliced against the mask, making no real impact. I cursed myself because I could not hold the armour _and_ make weapons of astral energy at the same time – at least, not for as long as I would need. It was one or the other and I dropped the suit of armour to make another splint moulded like a knife, aiming lower, cutting through the side of their throat and following it with another to their left arm, scraping them while they fell backwards and hit the carpet, blood slipping from between their fingers as they clutched their wound. I could see portals popping up all around the store from where I stood. I wanted to find Five, but I walked across the aisle to check that this agent was dead first.

Halfway there, the agent lifted a small gun and shot at me.

There was a wetness oozing from my right arm and I was knocked back by its force, one hand mechanically lifting to hold down the wound. I looked at the hot black liquid melting from the slash in my sweater and I felt no pain from it, though I felt the sheer _warmth_ of the blood. The agent had a shaky hand but I watched their finger inch for the trigger again and I tried to make a shield, a white light feebly tearing through the air in front of me but not quite taking hold. I tried again and again, panicking now, pushing backward from the agent, looking for cover where there was none that could protect against bullets.

The gun was blown from the agent’s hand and dropped to the ground with a soft thump.

Still clutching the wound on my arm, I looked across the railings and saw a pale white figure moving toward me. Passing beneath one of the rare overhead windows in the shop, I saw that she had dull red hair and a delicate face. She was walking calmly, at her own pace, as if she really was passing through a store and would simply walk right past me and the agent and continue onward, unaware of us.

But I squinted and felt a shudder of surprise, not entirely unpleasant, ripple through me because I recognised her.

“ _Pruitt_?”

Gunfire sparked behind me again and I ducked down, though Pruitt did nothing other than turn vaguely in the direction of that sound. I was in a poor hiding spot, stuck between railings. I began to slowly shuffle away from the agent and from Pruitt, who stood like a meerkat poking from tall strands of grass in the wilderness. It was bizarre to me that she did not attempt to find cover. Instead, she looked at the agent and bent down. I stopped my shuffle away from them and tried to see what was she was doing, but I was distracted by another round of gunfire.

“Astrid!”

Alarms were ringing, flashing red through the softer blue of the store. Five dropped beside me through one of his portals, breathing heavily. He seemed pale and tired and I could tell that he would not be able to jump any more than he already had, especially when he stumbled in his landing and fell to his knees against me. I yelped at the pressure of his hand grasping my right arm and finally felt the first throbbing burst of pain.

Five released me immediately and saw the redness of his own palm. “You’re bleeding,” he stated, seeming unable to believe it. “You’re injured.”

“Pruitt is here, Five. Why the Hell is she here?”

He carefully peeled the slash in my jumper. “Are you faint?”

“No,” I said.

“Would you know if you were?”

“I don’t _know_ , Five.”

He was weirdly out of sorts, his eyes as blank as Pruitt had looked. Then he swallowed and said, “We’ll make a run for it. You can make it, right, Astrid?”

“No offense, Five, but I think I’m more worried about _you_ right now.”

He shook his head. “I’m good. I can do it. On three?”

“Three,” I said.

Neither of us really waited for him to count and instead rushed out. I much preferred not feeling anything in my arm because the waves of agony were already more than I could handle, my hand clenched tightly around it to stem the blood-flow. Bright white lights followed us and we were trapped against the cashier desks, facing those agents whose weapons aimed for us again. I was not sure what had happened to Pruitt but could not see her behind those hard, beading lights which blinded us.

Sirens distracted them, a fleet of police cars popping up behind the glass doors. Five pulled us down behind the cashier desks while the agents were looking away, mumbling an apology when he bumped my arm and made me gasp from the pain of it.

Sheltered behind the desks, we waited and waited, our thudding hearts slowing and our adrenaline draining into nothingness until finally we could wait no more and he helped me stand, his eyes lingering on the wound in my arm.

“Lucky shot,” I grumbled. “Any other day, I would have won that fight.”

In the spot where Pruitt had been was a large splotch of blood spreading outward across the grey carpet and I was sure that at least that blood was not mine.

▬

Curled in the porcelain bathtub in the house, I patted at the fresh bandage he had wrapped around my arm, feeling the neat stitching underneath its cloth. The bathtub was empty and stained red; we had chosen to hide out in the bathroom, using the bathtub, because we could be wash away the blood more easily than the bed-sheets in my room or so we hoped, desperate to avoid the questions Luther would have if he saw anything.

It seemed he was the only one left, though it was hard to tell just where everyone had gone, as hard as it had been for them as it was all those years ago when they still stood in the same room as each other and wondered that same thing – _where had everyone gone? where had the academy gone?_

Five sat on the edge of the bathtub beside me, spine held in a curve as he slumped forward to cup his hands against his face, freshly washed after he had helped pull out the bullet and stitch the wound. He had learned from the times he had cleaned his own wounds and sewn himself together with the training we had had as children but also from his time with the Commission, unable to seek help at hospitals like normal people did. I was tired and worn out from the pain, though he had given me enough painkillers to ease the worst of it.

“Delores is dead,” I said hoarsely. “If mannequins can die, I guess.”

“And we still don’t know who that eyeball belongs to,” he said. “We’re screwed, Astrid. We have nowhere to go from here.”

“Well, come lay down.”

He snorted and moved his hands aside to look at me. “What?”

“Lay down in the bathtub. It’s pretty nice, all things considered. Come on, Five. Humour me.”

Sliding down at the other end of the bathtub, he let me lay my legs over his and he kept away from my arm as he tore off his shoes and threw him out. He stared at the ceiling and asked, “What do we do?”

“Take a small rest,” I said.

“We don’t have time to rest, Astrid. The world is ending.”

“We take a rest,” I said. “And start again tomorrow – while we still have a tomorrow, anyway.”

I leaned my head against the cold rim of the tub, letting myself close my eyes. I had never fallen asleep in a bathtub before but it was oddly comforting. I was stirred only by him speaking, lifting myself to look at him.

He said, “Don’t get shot again, all right?”

I laughed, leaning back once more. “I’ll try not to. And Five?”

“What?”

I lightly bumped his leg with mine. “Don’t tell me what to do, old man.”

Though the room was dim, I was still sure that I saw him smile.

▬

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lots of feelings. im all about feelings.
> 
> as i said, hope tags are sufficient now! i know i dont do anything sexually explicit in my story but i said mature because i felt it would spare any younger readers or those not interested in the pairing? idk im pretty dull on ao3 my fave stories are fluffy ones hahah. 
> 
> anyway i made the choice for klaus to sell stuff NOT because i wanted to make astrid mad with him (she's evidently not) but i think klaus has an addiction that is played for laughs sometimes and i think it can get really dark for him. so we are getting klaus soon and i wanted to work that in somehow. i love klaus, we need more klaus!
> 
> lots of luther/diego and i need to figure out more time with diego but that's for me to plot another day ;) i'm also trying to figure out if i could do a one-shot with diego and an OC but i am waiting for divine inspiration on a plot and i should prob finish this before ever even considering it. 
> 
> all this rambling!! sorry!!
> 
> also i bought the first comic of UA and it finally delivered yesterday. i read it one day. loved it! 
> 
> so have a great day/night wherever you are guys. as i said earlier my eyes are on fire from the screen so im gonna go now. i appreciate your continued support for my little story (can you guys believe its over 1000 views im like whoa) haha. lots of love!! x


	5. four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys!! a surprise update. a surprise to me too because i took a break from writing but i was listening to a playlist i made for astrid and i had some ideas to finish off season 1. i started writing and i eventually ended up with this chapter and im a little nervous to post especially after such a gap and my last note but i decided i will keep posting on ao3 and i am going to attempt to do so on FF with more clarity on the pairing. i know the tags explain it here anyway so this matters little to you guys who prefer ao3. since im continuing and hoping that you guys will accept that with tags in place, i deleted the last note. 
> 
> ANYWAY. i wanted to say i hope you all had a very merry christmas if you celebrate the holiday and if you don't, well, i do hope you've been having some good few days recently in any case. i do warn you all this chapter is a little sad (i mean even im saying that) but episode 3 ends on a sad note haha. btw did you guys see elliot page's post?? so happy with the response it was really heart-warming. gah all the emotions...
> 
> i was going to post this on new year's as like a 'hey, surprise, i'm back!' but it was so sad that i thought god these poor readers really will think i'm just torturing them for no good reason. 
> 
> all the best guys and please stay safe.  
> lots of love,  
> kaiseriin

# ☂

Number 8

“number eight”

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

_after: four_

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

There had been a dream that I had had but which had gotten lost in the bluish-green light slipping between the curtains in the bathroom. I felt the dream drain in colour, sucked down into that pit within my mind that I could never reach, never clean out enough to know what had once been in there. I was still slumped against the bathtub, languid and not wanting to move. I listened to birdsong, I listened to the house. There used to be a lot of sound in the mornings between breakfast and training and the shriek of the alarms for missions.

Now, the wood breathed and settled. Hinges creaked. But not an awful lot more than those muted, natural noises from the outside world, the same world which turned and moved and continued even while we slept between trying so hard to save it from what was coming.

From my shoulders, a blazer slipped and fell; not mine, it belonged to Five, but he had draped it around me sometime in the night and I felt that familiar warmth for him, smiling to myself. I leaned my forehead against the cool porcelain rim of the tub and angled myself to look at him. He lay against the other end of the tub in his blood-stained shirt and trousers, half-turned while his brows furrowed in his dreams.

I wondered if he was having another nightmare, because he twisted and flinched away from something unseen. I would have given anything to look into his mind then and know what tortured him; to know for certain that it was _me_ who tortured him, like I had always suspected.

I had followed him and what had it done for him? Left him afraid to look away from me because he feared that if he did, he might look back and find that I had faded again. Forgotten myself and soon forgotten him, too.

“Five,” I called. “Wake up.”

I nudged his foot but he did not stir. I sighed and leaned toward him but the sting in my right arm bloomed, though it was probably not as intense as it would have been and had my body not suffered from those strange delays. I bumped him again and his head lulled forward. He shook himself awake, drawing in one sharp and panicked breath, jolting up and gripping the tub as if he had thought that he was in danger.

His eyes found mine and his shoulders dropped, his body leaning back against the porcelain.

“Sorry. I just wanted to wake you.”

“It’s okay.”

“Thank you for the blazer.” I pulled it around my shoulders once more. “You should have kept it, though. This room is cold at night.”

“Thought you’d need it more than me,” he replied, smirking. “Given you got shot and all.”

“Had worse.” I smiled at him and leaned forward, drawing my knees against my chest and wrapping my arms around them. I leaned my cheek against one knee and watched him. “You have, too.”

“Yeah,” he muttered. “I have. Let me check it, would you?”

I slipped off his blazer, pulled the sleeve and peeled off the bandages carefully. He clambered forward, gently prising the end of the bandage from me and inspecting the black wound which marred the flesh of my arm. It was a swollen reddish colour and the skin puckered but it seemed, otherwise, to have cleaned nicely.

Satisfied, Five rolled the bandage back around my arm and fastened it, dropping back to his side of the tub once more.

“We should make a plan,” I said.

“Another plan.” He breathed out, blearily rubbing at his face. “Seems all we do is make plans and they fail, one after the other.”

“Good thing I’m the optimist, like you said.”

His hands fell from his face and landed in his lap. “Do you remember me saying that? I mean, _really_ remember?”

I combed through the fuzzy tufts of memories in my head. He had said it, I was certain of it, and tried desperately to remember where we had been. It had been warm, I was sure. He had tried to dry his clothes in that sunlight. I remembered, for no reason at all, the patches in his socks and the dark stains on his vest. I remembered his silhouette, too. Black against the sunlight, black against the trees.

“I think so,” I said carefully. “We had been at a beach. We talked about cafés.”

Slowly, he inched forward. “Yes,” he said. “What else?”

“We talked about which cafés we wanted to visit,” I continued. “We were playing that game. _What-if_. What if we got home, what if we survived –…”

His eyes sought something in mine. “You’re coming back,” he said quietly, hoarsely. “I knew you would.”

“Five –…”

There was a wild sheen to his stare; there was no arguing with him. “I knew you would,” he repeated. “I just had to get you back to your body. It was the only thing that mattered.”

It smouldered between us, unspoken, unanswered: _but what if all this is for nothing and we end up back there anyway?_

▬

In my bedroom, I found Klaus asleep atop my blankets with his legs tucked close against his chest and his face buried in the chameleon that Vanya had gotten me, his mouth mumbling words into its fur now matted with crusted drool. I had come to change into a fresh uniform but the sight of him held me in the threshold, thinking that he seemed so much taller, though he was slim and lanky and underfed.

If he moved too suddenly, he would fall off the bed, its frame having been broken by Luther. Things had been happening so quickly that I had not had much time to spend with Klaus and that stirred something in my stomach. I rounded the bed and lay down beside him, leaning on my left side rather than my right, though it meant that he faced away from me. I was careful, feeling the frame strain beneath me. One stumble and it would collapse fully.

Lightly, I poked him between his shoulder blades, twice. He responded with an incoherent mumble. I rolled my eyes and gave him one solid dig into his arm, which made him yelp and sit upward, leaning on his elbow. He turned his head, saw that I was behind him, and shuffled around so that we were looking at one another properly.

Klaus always induced a strange giddiness in me and I smiled, taking in the film on his eyes which made me wonder if I shouldn’t have let him sleep a little bit longer.

“Astrid?” Sleep made his voice heavy and deep. “What are you doing here?”

“You mean in _my_ bedroom? In _my_ bed? Gee, I don’t know. Couldn’t find a bed of your own, Goldilocks?”

“Bad habit. Used to crawl into your bed sometimes – …” He yawned and scratched at his cheek – “…Slept here all night, then snuck out at dawn before Mom could catch me.”

The smile on my lips dimmed, dented by remorse. I remembered that she had kept my bedroom like a shrine but could not recall who had told me that.

I reached out and smoothed down one of the curls that stuck against his temple, the kind of curl that our mother used to snip off after having ordered him to sit on a low stool for her, in the kitchen, where she chopped at his hair, letting gentle locks of his hair flutter and fall to the tiles, trimming and trimming until he looked less like a cherubim and more like a kid dressed in a uniform that he hated, in a house that he hated, sent on missions that he hated, made to train in sessions that he hated to use gifts that he hated.

His tired eyes roamed behind me and he groaned, slapping his hands to his face. He scrubbed at his skin so roughly that there was a raw pinkness to it once he pulled his hands away.

I pushed myself up, glancing around. “Is there someone here? Well, here to _you_.”

There was a drawn-out pause and I thought Klaus might answer truthfully. But he muttered, “Nope. Nobody. Just you and me and the great blue sea.”

I shuffled back against the pillow and wished that somehow I could have settled all that turmoil in his head, like a simple tap against his skull that would calm the endless chatter in there. _All your troubles taken away for me to carry instead._

Klaus rarely talked about his own gifts in a manner which was not meant for joking. I could not even tell if there was one spirit in this room or ten, that was how little he would reveal. It was simply something in his eyes which would dim and dart toward some blank spot on the wall or the chair or even at the end of the bed and I would look, too, like I might catch a glimpse of something that I never would.

He breathed out, stretching like a cat against the sheets. His joints popped and he went limp against the bed, his head tilting to look at me again. “You know, from what Five told me, it sounded quite _domestic_.”

“What do you mean?”

“This –…” His hand rose to draw an aimless pattern in the air before it fell against his stomach – “…impending doom because of some apocalypse or whatever. He mentioned it a little. You know what else he told me?”

Knowing that he wanted me to tease it out of him, I rolled my eyes and asked, “No, Klaus. What else did he tell you?”

He snuggled closer, like he was telling me a secret, and said, “That he had never understood how that astronaut had felt when he came back down to Earth. Not until those three months in the apocalypse.”

I craned my head back, cold surprise shuddering through me. Klaus could not understand it but I could, knowing that Five had meant those three months in which I had disappeared on him – knowing, too, that he meant the final chapter of that book in which the astronaut had repaired his spaceship and set off for Earth.

The astronaut had almost made it, watching the world through a small glass window which showed it growing bigger and bigger in front of him until something in his spaceship broke and it fell into a tailspin and all he thought about, while the lights in his cockpit crackled and fizzed out and the panelling ripped off from its sides, was the mistakes that he had made and the people that he would not see and what they would never even know about him and his adventures, because he could not tell him. He thought about how lonely it was to watch the world from a height so great, to only just grasp its immensity and its intricacy and its beauty and what he had lost.

I understood what Five had meant. I had felt it myself.

“Yeah,” Klaus muttered, rolling onto his back again. “I didn’t get it either. I mean, I asked him but the little bastard disappeared on me before I could get an answer out of him. What three months is he talking about? _What astronaut_?”

It would have meant telling Klaus all the stranger stuff that had happened, too. I saw the heaviness in his shoulders and figured he had enough of his own problems to worry about. His hands were shaky. He had sweat at his temples. I felt his shivering like it was my own, like his coldness went right down into my marrow and I trembled and trembled from it. I was struck by how much I had missed, all over again.

I felt a wetness at the corner of my eye, slipping down into the crease between my palm and pillow and I was glad that he was not looking at me anymore. He looked at my books, my wardrobe. He had kohl on his fingertips.

I had thought that my gifts brought the greatest pain because of the memory-loss and fading. But Klaus might have had it that little bit worse because he could not fade from anything unless he sniffed and swallowed and injected himself to that point.

If I had ruined myself, it was accidental. Klaus _wanted_ to ruin himself just to switch off all that sound in his head. That, for me, was something much worse.

“Five says a lot of strange things,” I said finally.

Klaus hummed. “Yeah. And the little prick never gave me my twenty dollars either. Cheapskate.”

I smiled weakly. “Little prick,” I repeated, though even Klaus could have heard the fondness in my voices. “Klaus, you know you can tell me anything, right?”

“Anything?”

“Sure.”

His eyes flicked between mine. His mouth tightened into an uncertain frown. “Well,” he said tentatively, “I suppose I should really talk to someone about it. I mean, it has been weighing on my mind for _so_ long –…”

Carefully, I straightened up against the headboard and waited patiently for him to continue because it seemed to take him a moment to compose himself. He mimicked me, sitting up slowly so that he would not collapse the fragile bedframe, smoothing a hand through his hair and shaking his head. Dread settled in my stomach and I wanted to beg him to tell me, to rip off the band-aid.

“I have this rash on my thigh,” he said, “and I found some weird cream in the bathroom but it only made it worse, so I looked it up on _Web MD_ and I think it might be the first sign of leprosy. What do you think?”

I slapped his arm and he let out a high-pitched, indignant shriek. “You _moron_!” I growled, “I was being _serious_!”

“So was I! It _itches_ , Astrid!”

Frustrated, I slapped him again, not enough to hurt him, though this time he slapped back and soon we were locked in battle, slapping blindly at one another with our heads turned away to avoid a smack, squabbling and kicking until there was a loud creak beneath us, right before the bedframe collapsed again and we tumbled onto the floor. He went onto one side of the bed and I slipped off the other, nearly landing on my right arm but catching myself in time.

I gripped onto the sheets for balance and turned to look at him. In that same moment, he looked at me, peeking over the edge of the bed. He launched himself over it and the slapping match continued through our laughter, hitting and poking until he shouted: “ _Uncle_!”

I pushed him off and quickly smoothed down my hair. “Good thing you surrendered,” I muttered, “or we would have been fighting all night and I have a lot to do today.”

“Can I come with you?”

“What? No.”

Klaus scrambled onto his knees and strung his fingers together, pursing his lips. “ _Please_ ,” he whined. “I’m not really a leper, I promise! That was just a joke –…”

“If I am not mistaken, you already have a task of your own to accomplish today, Master Klaus.”

Stood in the doorway, Pogo righted his tortoise-shelled spectacles and shuffled into the room, his cane tapping the wooden floorboards beneath him. Klaus’ shoulders dropped into a slump and he groaned, pushing himself up onto long and wobbly legs. He held his left hand out for me and I took it with my left hand in return, something that made him raise an eyebrow at me. He could ask nothing about it nor could he ask about why I needed even more help to stand than normal. I had worn myself out and not realised it until then.

It was yet another delayed sense that had come to me long after it should have.

I stood beside Klaus and looked at Pogo, who had noticed, too. What Klaus could not ask, Pogo certainly could and he would. But he would also wait until we were alone to do it.

Klaus lazily put his palm flat against his forehead in a salute, bowing at Pogo. “I’m on it, boss.”

“I also think it pertinent that you and I continue that conversation we had after you first awoke, Astrid,” Pogo said.

I nodded. “I just need to change my uniform and I’ll be right with you, Pogo. Twenty minutes, tops.”

Pogo turned for the hall, though his eyes had lingered on Klaus a moment longer. I watched the bob of Klaus’ throat and wondered what had happened between them that Pogo seemed so displeased with him. Pogo finally left, the gentle tap of his cane dimming into the emptiness of the house until no sound was left aside from the whine of the floorboards under Klaus, who fidgeted and then flopped back onto my broken bed. Its frame groaned and sank even lower.

“What was that about?” I asked.

Klaus feigned ignorance. “I think he wanted to speak with you. Seemed important.”

“With you, dummy.” I gently bumped his shoulder with my fist as I went around him, toward the wardrobe. I pulled out fresh shoes and an ironed shirt. “What did you do?”

I heard him sigh. “I _might_ have lost something that belonged to the old man. I mean, how was _I_ supposed to know it was important?”

Tossing a skirt onto the closest chair, I asked, “Lost it? Or sold it like my bracelets?”

There was a beat of pure, uninterrupted silence, something which was rare around Klaus. Even if he was not speaking, he made an awful lot of noise simply through moving around and toying with things around him, because he was incapable of sitting still. I smoothed a tie against the clothes I had taken from the wardrobe and glanced at him. He picked at a scab on his elbow.

Then he flopped around to look at me. “In my defence, you were comatose,” he said lightly. “What use would bracelets have been to you?”

I paused, a fresh blazer folded in my arms. Soon I continued moving about, which bothered him more than if I had screamed or shouted at him or done what Diego had probably tried to do and punch his lights out. I suspected that Klaus would much prefer Diego punched his lights out because then the whole fight would be over with and all would be, mostly, forgiven.

But silence ate away at Klaus much more than a shiner, so I propped my shoes close to my knee-high socks and I folded the collar of my shirt and checked the pleating on my skirt and waited.

“All right, all right! I’m _sorry_ ,” he blurted out. “I didn’t mean it, okay?”

“I’m not angry with you,” I said.

He stilled, eyeing me suspiciously. “Really? Not gonna yell at me? Not gonna call me a great disappointment? Not gonna _disown_ me?”

“Nope. You were right that the bracelets were of no use to me,” I said. “But they meant a lot to Diego. Maybe you should apologise for that one. Might help that little rift between you if you did.”

Klaus blew a raspberry. “Oh, please, he got over it.”

I raised my eyebrows but otherwise did nothing else.

“He – oh, come _on_ , it was years ago! I – fine. You know what, _fine_. I’ll talk to him about it the next time I see him. But if you find me walking on crutches after it, you’ll know what happened.”

“You do that. Now get lost, I need to change and Pogo is waiting on me. And _you_ need to go eat and then have a shower, Klaus. After you find whatever it is you took from the office, that is.”

He slouched off the bed and wandered to the door, humming a little tune beneath his breath. He held the wooden frame and swung around, so that he stood in the hall but faced me. He snapped his fingers twice, catching my attention all over again.

“That reminds me,” he said. “Have _you_ eaten anything today? Or had anything to drink?”

I blinked at him. “No. Why?”

He shrugged, resting his head against the frame of the door. “Another weird thing Five asked me to do,” he muttered. “Said you’ve been so busy lately, you skip some stuff. I’m supposed to drop hints or whatever.”

Another hot flush of warmth spread through me, turning my cheeks a funny pink. I turned for my window, pretending to smooth out imagined creases in the sleeves of my shirt. Five had always had his own ways of caring for others. He had not told Klaus, either, about the memory-loss and the lack of hunger, thirst and all the rest of it. He had kept my secrets like I wanted to keep his secrets. I found it made feel as if I stood out in the garden, beneath the sunlight, golden and light and endless even if the actual sunlight outside was cold, frosted blue.

“Very subtle,” I called to him. “And rich, coming from the both of you. Someone ought to remind _you_ guys instead of me.”

Klaus hummed. “Yeah, but you let him know I did what he asked. Maybe then he’ll give me my twenty bucks. And maybe you’ll stop _blushing_.”

Mortified, I twisted around and lobbed my shoe at him. It smacked against the door and dropped beside him. He was grinning, sticking his tongue out at me. With a rush of astral energy, I slammed the door shut and he hopped aside right before it could hit him.

The floorboards bleated beneath his boots. Though it was muffled and distant, I heard what he said, because he yelled it across the house, in his sing-song way.

“Get a load of this, everybody. Astrid’s _blushing_!”

In the mirror beside my wardrobe, I saw that he was right.

▬

In the kitchen, I found Five sipping coffee. Hot white wisps rose from its surface and lapped at him. He leaned with one elbow propped on the table, his chin cradled against his fist. He watched the blue birdhouse through the window of the kitchen that looked into the garden. There was a sparrow, pecking and flitting this way and that about its feeder.

I called out to Five and his eyelids fluttered, like he thought I was calling from someplace further. Then he shook himself like he had in the bathtub, as if making himself wake from sleep. I worried about him. I worried about him as much as he worried about me. He saw me in front of him and I caught how he relaxed.

“Pogo asked to see me, Five.”

He took a sip of coffee. “What about the eyeball?”

“Go ahead without me. Stake the place out, it should take you a couple of hours.” I reached into my pocket and fished out the notepad, writing a quick line to remind myself. I heard his scoff, looking up at him. “What?”

“You were remembering stuff this morning, Astrid,” he said. “You remembered that you’re supposed to go see Pogo now, too. Probably don’t even need that thing anymore. It was only supposed to be temporary anyway.”

“I know,” I said. “But this notepad was your idea too, Five. Two or three memories hardly means –…”

“Two or three more than you could remember yesterday,” he interrupted. “You don’t _need_ it. You can do it on your own now. You’re better than you were when we got back. Can’t you see that?”

“If you really thought that, you wouldn’t have asked Klaus to check that I remembered to eat and drink,” I said.

“That’s different. You don’t _forget_ to do it, you just don’t feel the _need_ to do it until it hits you,” he mumbled. “Besides, I told that moron to drop _hints_. No technique with him, no delicacy. Just a damn bull in a china-shop.”

I smiled, sliding onto the stool alongside him. He had taken a fresh shirt from his room, swapped his bloodied culottes for another pair. He took the eyeball from his pocket and rolled it around in his palm. Using astral energy, I lifted it from his hand and let it twirl and spin in front of him. He watched it, letting out a long sigh before tipping his coffee against his mouth. I had only taken the eyeball for fun, for no reason other than to distract him and lighten his sullen mood.

But I watched it spin and remembered him saying something else: _attagirl. now lift it and drop it in my hand._

“I remember something else,” I told him. “I remember how hard it was for me to do this in the apocalypse, at first.”

His cup lowered. “Two or three memories, huh?”

“I don’t remember all of it, Five. Most of the time, I couldn’t tell you where we were, _when_ we were – was it a week after we got to the apocalypse or twenty years into it? The little details never seem to come back to me.”

“But they will,” he insisted. “Pogo will know what to do.”

He held his palm flat and I let the eyeball drop onto it. He smiled, though it was tired and worn. “Attagirl,” he said.

I leaned forward and pecked his cheek. I stayed close to him. “Just – don’t get your hopes up yet, all right?”

“I thought you were the optimist, not me.”

I grinned. “Damn right. Good luck with the eyeball.”

“Yeah, yeah. Good luck with Pogo.”

I skirted around the table and made a beeline for the back-door of the kitchen that led outside. He chugged his coffee and the legs of his stool scraped against the ground. I gripped the handle and pushed open the door but stood for a moment to glance back at him.

“Five?”

He had been pulling down his shirt and straightening his tie but stood motionless at the call of his name. “Yeah?”

“Klaus also told me about the astronaut,” I told him. “How you felt like him in those three months when I was gone.”

Five sniffed. “Figured it was all right to tell him because he wouldn’t understand what it meant,” he grumbled.

“But I do.”

“If anyone would understand me, Astrid, it’d be you.” He dared smile through his sullen mood. “Guess more than forty years together would make sure of that.”

“Forty years,” I said. “I’m stuck with you.”

Smirking, he finished with his tie. He put his hands in his pockets and said, “What can I say? I’m a sucker for a pretty girl.”

All over again, I was flushing an awful pink and I turned, pushing out into the garden. Behind me, he was humming a song that sounded suspiciously like what Klaus had been humming and I blushed even harder.

▬

I crossed the garden and watched wildflowers curl beneath my shoes. I bent to pluck up a daisy and pull at its petals, because it reminded me of something and I could not say what it was. It was a simple daisy among many others yet it seemed to taunt me. I felt the soft peach-fuzz of its stem against my fingertips, little bristles shown even more strongly if I held it against sunlight. It had meant something. It was just lost on me.

I blew it from my hands and watched its stem, slack and mossy green in colour, land on mud, so light that it did not leave an imprint until it was crushed beneath my last steps taken to the large doors that led into a lonely damp little hall at the end of the garden, where another mahogany door would take me into the study that Pogo had claimed for himself so many years ago.

I tapped thrice and heard the shuffle of papers before he answered. He brought me into the cosiness of what had always been one of my favourite rooms in the whole house and, like the house, it had remained stagnant in all that time I had been gone, so that it still held the scent of aged, yellowed paper and mint and heady wooden spice blended together, a scent that I had never found anywhere else and which seemed to welcome me.

I had not felt that the house itself had been home, when I first woke up. But here, in his study, I had that feeling of _home_.

“Right on time,” he told me. “Would you like some tea, Astrid?”

Immediately, I had opened my mouth to tell him that I was not thirsty but Klaus and Five floated into the forefront of my mind and I hesitated.

“Sure,” I said. “I can make some for us both, if you’d like.”

There was a great comfort in sifting between his cupboards for teaspoons and teabags and mugs with dust that had to be cleaned out with a cloth and rinsed. He had a small sink and a tea-towel stabled alongside it. The comfort came from muscle-memory which moved me around his study as if I had never left it. Pogo had not rearranged his furniture, he had not changed his cupboards; my hands moved like the waving gestures of a conductor before his orchestra, stirring teabags until the water twirled in strong brown, tapping sugar-cubes from their porcelain jar painted yellow and striped in red – one for him, two for me.

I had not even needed to think about it. I had felt it in my hands before my mind had understood it. I wished all other things could have been so simple as putting those steaming mugs of tea between us on the desk.

“I have wondered where we should begin,” he said, taking the first sip. “How I have missed your talent for making a fine brew, Astrid.”

I smiled. “Learned from the best.”

“Indeed.” His eyes glittered. “Perhaps it would be best for you to tell me what happened in your time away. Spare me no details. It is critical that I understand what became of you both.”

So, that was where it had started, the story of how I had separated from my body in front of Five and saw the portals that he left behind, all throughout until the end of the apocalypse. He had not wanted me to leave out the little things yet I did not mention the Commission. I could not mention them.

For him to be disappointed in me for what I did during those hazy years – it would have killed me off quicker than memory-loss and fading.

He had his fingers laced beneath his chin, his head turned toward the window. It was still hidden behind drooping, beige-tinted curtains, darkened through age and having not been washed and left to clot with dust like the dust in the mugs. Grime had built around the square-patterned framing which slashed through the frosted glass. Even on a sunny day, those windows kept the room muted and blue and that contrasted with the lamps he kept scattered around; one on his desk, another teetering on his coffee-table, another strung atop his bookshelf.

“As I am sure you are well aware,” he said, “there is no precedent with which we can compare or contrast what you have experienced. Therefore, it is impossible for me to state that your memory-loss will be resolved simply by having returned to your body, though I should think it bodes well that you have recovered some memories already.”

He took a deep breath.

“Your inability to sense certain internal and external factors such as hunger or heat is rather unusual. I believe you and Five were correct in your deductions that some form of delay between your mind and body has continued despite the reconnection of both halves.”

“Well, did anything happen on this side?”

Pogo pulled off his spectacles. He held them against the watery light of his window, inspecting them before plopping them on his nose again.

“Yes,” he said. “I informed you that your body had entered stasis and had not altered itself in many years. However, this is not entirely accurate. Your body remained in stasis for incredibly long periods of time and this meant that you remained as you had been upon separation from your mind. All bruises which had occurred during training sessions were left unable to heal, never once shifting in colour. You also had cuts which could not be treated. You were, effectively, unable to degrade because stasis would preserve all wounds and injuries, as well as your general wellbeing, precisely as it had been.”

I found myself perched at the edge of my seat, leaning forward, unable to tear my eyes away from him.

“Occasionally, however,” he added, “your body suffered momentary lapses in which it could not maintain stasis. This, as I am sure you can predict, were instances of great precarity for your survival as it caused cardiac arrest.”

The cup in my hand seemed to tremble. I glanced down at it, startled that it was my own hand shaking that caused it. “I don’t understand,” I said.

But I had understood perfectly, so why had I bothered saying that?

“If your mind was suffering degradation, however it may have manifested, your instinct would be to reinsert yourself into your body to prevent further damage,” he said gently. “But your mind had travelled, both temporally and physically, to such a great distance that no matter how many times it attempted to reconnect, it simply could not do so.”

He paused.

“I suspect,” he continued, “that your body had exited stasis in anticipation of that reconnection and that the sheer pressure of maintaining astral projection, combined with the failure to reconnect, forced your body into cardiac arrest. If you consider your body and mind tethered to one another, then that link between them had been stretched to the point of complete breakage.”

“I was dying.” I let out a weak, shaky laugh. “Each time – _all_ that time – I was dying.”

The quiet in his study seemed to creep up along my spine and slither around my throat to choke me. I wanted loud, thundering sound to fill my eardrums and squash that echo which repeated, over and over, in perfect bluntness: _I was dying._

Never had I better understood Klaus’ need to block out silence.

“If one half of you had failed, we were unsure what would become of the other. Say, for example, that your body had succumbed to cardiac arrest. Would your astral projection, and thus your mind, cease to exist as well? Or if, as you aptly recounted to me, your astral projection had ‘ _faded_ ’ – would it have been death as we understand it? You had begun to lose memories, lose your sense of location and ability to tell who you were and who Five was to you. But would your astral projection have been capable of surviving without your body, regardless of its degraded mental state? These questions, I cannot answer. These are questions I also dread to answer.”

The wisps flicking from his mug as he brought it to his lips looked like white, forked tongues snapping madly at him.

“What little we understood,” he said. “We believed you to be capable of telekinesis and astral manipulation, certainly. But what this suggests of what other possibilities through astral projection –…”

“Five would have been left alone,” I said. “I promised him so many times that I would never leave him there, that I would always come back to him. I _promised_ him, Pogo. But he would have been alone, in that hideous place. He dreads being alone, you know –…”

Hoarseness cut off my words and he nudged my forgotten mug of tea toward me. I drank greedily. There was another bout of birdsong from the rooftop. The world was still turning, moving, continuing. Wood breathed, hinges creaked. I felt it helped to tell myself that and so I told myself again. Birdsong, world turning, wood and hinges, breathing, creaking.

Pogo had waited for me to calm myself before he spoke again. “Your father believed you to be an incredibly powerful individual, Astrid,” he said. “That you are sitting here before me, speaking and hearing and understanding as you do after such trauma, most certainly testifies to that power. Regardless of residual memory-loss or side-effects, you must acknowledge that as I do.”

“I used to hear children talk about their fathers,” I told him. I was looking at the floor, at the dust trapped between the planks of wood. “And it would make me think about _my_ father – I never thought about Reginald Hargreeves when I did that. I thought of you, Pogo.”

His eyes were soft and damp against the light. “I dare say that sixteen years ago, I would have advised you not to say such things. I would have said it best not to negate what Reginald Hargreeves has done for the _both_ of us.”

“And now?”

“Now, I will be bold enough to say that when I heard others speak of their children, I thought of you,” he said finally.

I smiled and sniffled, resting my elbows on my thighs as I bent forward on the chair, cupping my hands together so I could rest my chin on them. I laughed to myself, shaking my head.

“I would have let myself be split apart a thousand times over just to tell you that.”

He settled back in his chair and his eyes held a shine that glinted against the sunlight struggling through his fogged, grimy windows. “Though I cannot propose to truly comprehend what this _splitting_ feels like for you, Astrid,” he said, “I must say nonetheless that it sounds very much like how it felt when I found that you had been separated from your body – what it felt like upon each day that I entered that room in the house where we cared for you after the separation.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you misunderstand,” he said. “It was not that I loathed caring for you. On the contrary, I would have done so until my dying breath. But knowing that you were far from us, lost as you were – that was a heartbreak unlike any I have ever known.”

For a long time, we sat together and sipped our tea and there was no need for more than that. I needed the normality of it. I needed to know that there was more to all this than one struggle after another. So, I let myself sit. I tried not to think about the Commission, tried not to think about agents coming after us. I thought about the sweetness of my tea, the sizzle of another sugar-cube thrown in. I felt warm like I had in the kitchen with Five. I felt I had made it back that little bit more.

▬

Some time had passed; always passing, always ticking and ticking away from me. Perhaps he sensed that too, because he rose from his chair and hobbled toward his bookshelf and I realised that he had grown much older, too old, so that his own mortality struck me like it had struck me that Klaus had gotten so tall.

He crouched, taking a handful of books from their shelf and placing them aside. He pulled out a small toolbox that had been tucked behind the books. It was made of carved wood, decorated with little spirals. It took a while for it to spark anything with me but soon I understood that it was what he used to keep together all the spare cogs and little wheels and casings for pocket-watches.

“I recall that your pocket-watch had been broken in the week before your unintentional departure, Astrid.”

“I fell on it,” I said. “Little squabble with Luther. Cracked the front, stopped the wheels from turning.”

“Shall we make another?”

“Do you think it might help me?”

He tilted his head, once again looking over the rim of his spectacles. “I think it shall help you very much,” he agreed, “though perhaps not as you intend. There is no evident cure for your memory-loss, Astrid. As I told you, I am inclined to believe that simply having returned to your body is already allowing a healing process to begin. You cannot rush it nor can you control it. But what have I told you about the usefulness of a pocket-watch? Do you remember that, if nothing else?”

Again, it was like wading through fog. I sought out all the memories that I could of sitting in his study with him but it was slipping away from me. I could have remembered it that morning or that evening but in that moment, when he asked it of me, it fled into the cool blank spots of my mind where I could not find it.

“Do not force yourself,” he said. “It will come to you when you need it. Until then, I think it very good to indulge in actions which are familiar to you. You did not need to ask me where everything was in this office.”

“Because you never changed anything around.”

“I am a habitual creature.”

He placed the toolbox on the desk and motioned for me to come closer. He sat in his chair and I pulled a velvet stool from the corner of the room, nearest to the sofa. I plopped it down alongside him and sat on it. He flicked on the warm yellow lamp overhead, tilting its wide mouth so that its bulb-tongue landed on the toolbox and curled into its etched spirals.

“You must allow yourself to carry out motions as they naturally come to you,” he told me. “Do not attempt to remember what is already innately within yourself. You know what parts are needed and you know what parts are not. Let us start, shall we?”

Pogo unlocked the golden latch on the front of the toolbox. Then, he settled back in his seat and swept his hands out for me to continue.

I had always liked to line the cogs and wheels in rows before I chose a casing. I was not sure what made me do that, because only some of those cogs would fit the correct casing and others would be too large, too wide to fit. But I carefully dropped each little scrap of metal onto the soft leather pad of his desk and looked for the screws, lining them on the edges, without thinking too hard about it.

There was no struggling through a jungle of tangled memories strung together within my head. It was simply movement, taking one piece and putting it beside another, catching minute screws between forceps, putting them down, taking an emptied casing and holding it against the yellow light to examine it.

“I like this one,” I said.

“Then this is the one we shall use.”

With the casing chosen, I began putting together the clock-face, which was meticulous and slow and beautifully numb work. He stood and leaned to help slot wheels and cogs together. It was like it had been for me as a little girl, looking up at his wise face and wondering if one day I might be as knowledgeable as him; if one day I might be like him at all, because I wanted so badly to be. I had never truly grasped it until then, how much I had idolised him.

Soon, it was finished. There was a soft _tick-tick-tick_ from the pocket-watch and we strung it on a golden chain which caught the light and flashed, sparked, shone. I loved it as much I had loved that old watch. I loved it because we had made it together. I held the pocket-watch close and studied its black numbers and its black hands.

“Marvellous work, Astrid.”

Time had passed. I saw it there in the clock-face; the difference, now, was that I felt it too, in the _tick-tick-tick_ against my palm.

Unaware of myself, I whispered, “There is something to be said for holding a pocket-watch in the palm of your hand and finding yourself in its ticking sound.”

“Marvellous,” he said again.

▬

Walking through the house, I wound the chain of the pocket-watch between my fingertips, pulling it up, letting it fall, pulling it up. I was lost in a world of my own – another world, though I was careful this time not to drift too far away from my own. I intended to find Five and tell him what Pogo had told me before the details could slip from me.

I wanted to pause for a moment and scribble it down but I also wanted to mull through it myself. I felt proud of the watch, tucking it into my left pocket and smoothing my thumb across its front like I had done so often as a little girl. I walked in that same body now but I was so much more.

Beneath the golden arch that led into the main-room came familiar voices dithering back and forth. Like the morning that I had awoken, I had been passing that room. This time around, though, nobody had noticed me because Luther pushed himself toward Diego and Allison tried to hold them apart and Vanya stood with her cuffs bundled tightly around her fists. I had rolled my eyes and turned course into that room to stop their little argument but noticed something – a television on the marbled countertop where Klaus poured himself a whiskey.

Slowly I moved into the room and weaved between them. Their incessant bickering died out immediately. I stepped in front of that television and squinted that that staticky-blue image, blurred from graininess. I saw the outline of an old man in his bed and realised that it was Reginald Hargreeves.

Beside him stood my mother, her arms in front of her, bent toward him. It occurred to me that even in his dying moments, if that was what this image showed, she was still – still – _still_ – serving this worthless old man who never showed an ounce of gratitude to her for it. 

Without looking away from the picture, I asked, “What are you arguing about?”

There followed a silence in which no-one seemed willing to answer me. I turned to them, looking at them one after the other and hating that they all looked away, even Diego, whose throat rippled as he swallowed. It was Vanya who spoke up, surprising me and perhaps the others too, because she stepped forward and loosened the tight hold on her cuffs.

“We’re worried about Mom,” she said. “Luther thinks we should – well –…”

She floundered, glancing at the others for back-up.

“He thinks we should shut her off,” Diego said. He crossed his arms over his chest. “Like the machine he thinks she is.”

I dragged my eyes to Luther. “Shut her off.”

Luther drew himself to his full height, though somehow he still seemed sheepish. “Her programming hasn’t been working,” he said. “I mean, Grace _saw_ Dad was dying and did _nothing_ to help him.”

He had scolded me for disowning the old man and calling him Reginald. But now he called her Grace.

Cool bitter spite pooled in my mouth and soiled my words, which came out before I could hold myself back. “Good,” I said. “I’m glad.”

He recoiled, recovered, then crowded me with his mammoth frame, his finger pointed at me. “You know what, Astrid, that man kept you alive for sixteen goddamn years, he did everything to make sure you survived –…”

Diego asked, “Did he?”

Silenced once again followed. Luther had dropped his eyes to the lush rugs beneath his boots. Then, he tightened his mouth and tightened his fists and tightened his resolve, facing Diego.

“What did you say?”

Diego still had his arms crossed but let them drop as he took a couple of steps closer to Luther, tilting his head back to look up at him.

“ _Did_ he do everything to keep Astrid alive, big guy? Are you really gonna lie right to her face right now? Lie to all of us?”

“Diego,” Allison warned. “Drop it, _now_.”

They were doing it again, looking anywhere but at me, and the house was caving, coming down, crashing into me. I felt the thudding of my heart and the endless swirl of blood against my eardrums; _tick-tick-tick_. I had an itch behind my eyeballs, had a dull throb in my palms. I wanted to hold my pocket-watch but it seemed too far away from me. All of it seemed too far away from me.

Diego let out a bitter scoff. He stepped closer to Luther, chests almost touching. No-one would dare tread any closer to pull them apart.

“You want to emulate the old man so much that you would shut Mom down the same way he wanted to shut off the machines that kept Astrid alive toward the end there, wouldn’t you?”

Luther spoke through gritted teeth. “It wasn’t like that.”

Diego laughed. “It wasn’t? Maybe I’m misremembering. How do you guys remember it? Because how _I_ remember it is this: Mom and Pogo went rushing up to that room and the machines were making a goddamn racket and why? Because her heart was failing – her _heart_ , Luther. And what did they find up there? Why, they found the old man in there, turning everything off.”

I stared at him. “Why would he do that?”

Diego swallowed, his demeanour much more remorseful when he was not facing Luther. “He thought it would force your body and mind to reconnect,” he said finally. “And if it didn’t, well – he said there was no point in keeping –…”

“Keeping a vegetable alive,” I finished, only guessing the word, though I saw that I had either gotten it or been close based on how they all shifted uncomfortably. “Pogo never told me that. He said they resuscitated me –…”

“They did,” Vanya said quietly. “Dad ordered Pogo and Mom not to intervene but they saw that it wasn’t going to force your body and mind back together just like that, that it was madness to even try. Pogo disobeyed orders. He made Mom help him. Dad was furious. He and Diego…”

She trailed off, taking a furtive look at Diego. His jaw was wound tight. He had crossed his arms again.

“They saved your life,” she said. “But it caused some problems after. I think you had heart trouble from that point onward.”

“Lapses,” I said. “Pogo told me those were lapses in stasis. I thought that _I_ caused those.”

“Maybe,” she mumbled. “We weren’t supposed to talk about it.”

“You can’t compare what happened to Astrid with what’s happening to Grace,” Luther said stubbornly. “Grace is not human, she’s a _machine_ , her programming is degrading –…”

“Well, so is mine,” I said flatly. “Has been for a while.”

He glared at Diego. “What the Hell is she talking about?”

I looked up. “All that time in the apocalypse degraded me, too, Luther. I lost memories, lost –… But I was just with Pogo and he never said anything. He never told me.”

There was pity in their eyes and I hated it.

Diego moved toward me, putting his hand on my shoulder. It was a comfort. He bent to look into my eyes. “Astrid, you don’t need to explain a damn thing to Luther. You owe him _nothing_ ,” he said.

“Wait a minute,” Allison called. “I want to know what she’s talking about, Diego. Astrid – …”

“ _Now_ you want to know,” he snapped, turning his head to glare at her. “What, no interview to give? No autographs to sign? Got enough time for her now? But not when she was in that bed, huh?”

“You’re not being fair, Diego,” Luther muttered.

“Fair,” Diego snorted. “Always about _fairness_ with you, Luther. The real world doesn’t _work_ like that, buddy, and you’d know it if you spent a day as a real adult and not a _man-baby_ –…”

Luther shifted his weight from side to side. “I’m not a man-baby,” he muttered under his breath. “Just a regular man-… _man_ …”

Vanya piped up. “Guys, shouldn’t we just –…”

“You know, I think we could all use a drink,” Klaus said, tipping the whole bottle to his lips and chugging. “Anybody else? I think I have shot glasses somewhere around here.”

Allison reached her hand to me. “Astrid?”

I avoided her touch. I avoided all of them. I wanted to cry and I wanted Five. I touched my pocket-watch and had the oddest urge to crush it in my fist. I had just made it. I had _loved_ making it. Yet I wanted to feel its glass front slice through my palm and I wanted Pogo to see that I had broken something that he had helped make.

He had done that already, anyway.

“I’ll be back later,” I said distractedly. “I need – I don’t know.”

I felt a warmth in my hands but I was not holding a mug of steaming tea and I breathed the yellowed pages of books but I was not in that study with Pogo anymore, not putting together pocket-watches, not feeling the cool metal of cogs and wheels. I stepped backward, blindly, toward the arch. I wanted nothing more than to fly someplace else, someplace new, to another birdhouse, to another world. I had spent so much time getting back to this one that such a sudden, conflicting feeling made little sense to me.

But then nothing was making sense.

▬

Something brought me to that bedroom upstairs, where my body had lain for sixteen years. The machines had been taken away but the bed remained. I was not able to bring myself to sit on it and so I settled in the armchair alongside it as if I visited myself in the same way that Diego had, on Sundays – _every Sunday_.

I had spent so much time sitting within the cast of my own body that now it seemed these two halves of me would never fully be whole. I wondered about Pogo and why he had not told me about Reginald turning off those machines. Had he wished to protect Reginald or Mom or himself? Had he wished to protect _me_?

I loathed this room because I had always been alone in it and I understood, once again, what frightened Five so badly about being alone, though he would not admit it to anybody but me. I would have enjoyed stripping the wallpaper off and breaking the windows and setting the bed alight in here, if I could have. But I sat and did nothing more than stare at those polished skirting boards. Even if she was degrading, there was some instinct in my mother to wipe the skirting boards and clean things that hardly even mattered, but she had been _told_ mattered all the same.

_you must allow yourself to carry out motions as they naturally come to you_

Nothing came naturally to her. She had been programmed to these things and so she did them. I understood that, too, and marvelled that Luther could not, given he had been told what to do his entire life, so that I often wondered if he could even function on his own, without the house, without the team. He considered himself to be in charge of something that had fallen apart years ago. He was carrying out motions as they came to him and so were the rest of us. Only Five seemed to have broken the mould and even then he sometimes fell into old habits.

“Astrid, honey? Are you all right?”

Mom gently pushed the door further open and stepped inside, shutting it behind her. She did what I could not and sat on the bed in front of me, pushing aside some stray blonde hair that had fallen out from my daisy-patterned clip.

 _Old habits_ , I thought again.

Her hand was neither cold nor warm, this time. Her smile was like it always had been. Her perfume washed me in a floral scent, sweet and light and spritzed only once to be rubbed between her wrists. Reginald had hated those rich, overpowering scents. Even the scent of perfume, he had controlled. I felt it bubble up in my mouth again: bitterness, hatred, everything that I would rather not be but that he brought out in me.

“I heard that Reginald turned off my machines,” I told her.

Her smile faltered. “Oh,” she said. “When did he do that?”

“A long time ago.” I cocked my head. “He would have watched me die because he thought that was a better outcome for me than being trapped in that bed. Didn’t even think me capable of getting out myself. Is that right?”

“You’re being silly,” she said. “You were never trapped in bed. You’re sitting right here with me, sweetheart.”

She could not remember.

She could not _remember_ that I had been in that bed for sixteen years nor could she even _fathom_ it and this great hollow pit within myself was what Five had felt for so many years. Had he been forced to speak in a light, delicate tone like I did around her, so as not to upset her, not to trigger confusion and fear? But she could not remember.

So, I held her hand and she held mine and we were two souls who understood each other. She had a soul. Reginald had not thought so. But I did. I could separate mine from my body but she could not separate hers. I wished that she could, so that she might have left her broken programming behind.

“I love you, Mom,” I told her.

She was looking at the curtains. “I always said we should have painted this room a lovely mint colour. What do you think, Number Eight?”

The title cut through me. “I think that would be nice,” I said.

She smiled. She stood and wandered back into the hall, shutting the door behind her.

▬

Not half an hour later, gunfire bloomed from the hallway upstairs.

▬

Running for the bedrooms, I stopped in my tracks at the sight of an agent being thrown from one room, arms splayed as she hit the wall in the hallway where I was. She wore a puppy-dog mask blown bulbous and large. She righted herself and kicked at Diego who burst from the room right after her. He blocked and blocked, though he was being pushed back through the hall, cornered. I was standing in front of the railing which rounded the mezzanine and I gripped it at the sudden sense of being split apart again.

There was rippling white light around that mask the agent wore and it set off the _tick-tick-tick_ of a pocket-watch that I neither touched nor could possibly hear from my left pocket, even when the splitting worsened and I doubled because it felt as if my astral form was separating from me, thrashing, bucking, fighting against me until I was sure that it had to be something different, not simply one form but another version of myself layering over me.

“Astrid!” Diego called. The agent had his wrist locked, twisting him to the ground. “ _Astrid_!”

The splitting stopped as suddenly as it had come and I straightened up, letting out one long sigh of relief, nodding at him. I stepped forward to help him, thinking that that was what he had called me for – but what he was really trying to warn me about came a second later.

Another agent had been rushing toward me from my right-hand side and I had been so crippled with that splitting that I had not noticed him until he swung a baseball bat into my stomach so violently that I stumbled backward one step and crashed over the railings of the mezzanine, sent spiralling downward toward the black-and-white tiles of the lobby.

In that one brief second of clarity before all sound and colour blurred together into one continuous echo within my eardrums, I felt my fear of heights bubble up in my calves and my mouth jammed with a scream and I did not think, not even once, to wrap myself in a shield or even curl into a ball while free-falling that small distance between the railings and tiles.

But I had a softer landing than what I had imagined and dared loosen the tight scrunch of my eyes to find that Luther had caught me and seemed as surprised about that as I was.

He looked dumbly up at the ceiling as if he thought I had come from the clouds. Gently he put me down and that was a feat for him, bending awkwardly with his large frame. I had jelly-legs, a tremble than ran up and down and made me wobble a little but solid ground made me feel an awful lot better. I had mumbled a weak _thank-you_ to him but he was already striding for the main room, where only hours before we had fought.

That argument was forgotten. For as long as it took to bring down these agents, we would fight as a team again.

I rushed after him, overcome with a sudden fear that Vanya might have been in there on her own. She had still been in the house last that I had seen her and she would never have been able to take on two Commission agents.

I skid into the room and barely dodged the puppy-dog agent who Luther gripped by the neck and threw out into the lobby. Diego launched himself onto the back of the other agent who had his hand around Allison’s throat, choking her. I was surprised that he had enough strength that even Diego could not rip him off her and wrapped my own hand in astral energy to punch the agent right in the chest – a punch like that was as strong as Luther could make it. The agent loosened his hold but Allison could still not push him off, her nails scratching frantically at his wrist.

Luther appeared beside me and we nodded at one another, readying ourselves for one solid punch at the same time. It buckled the agent and Luther grabbed his shoulders, tossing him into the lobby like he weighed no more than a sack of flour to him. For Luther, that was a fair comparison.

He rushed for Allison and helped her stand, checking her throat. She patted his hand and smiled weakly, though she drew in short, chopped breaths. She cried out, “Who the Hell are these guys?”

All three of them looked at me.

“I think they might want to hurt us,” I said lamely.

“Yeah, no shit,” Diego grumbled.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” Luther said, nodding at Diego.

“I was doing just fine!”

“Oh yeah, you really had them –…”

“You ever heard of a rope-a-dope?”

Allison was cradling her throat, one hand placed against the column for balance. I felt a surge of guilt. She had been hurt because of what Five and I had brought into this house. I opened my mouth to call out to her but the sharp click of a gun forced me to turn back around. I was more prepared and placed an astral shield in the doorway. Bullets plopped against it like droplets but little wood chippings splintered from around the frame and fluttered down.

Through the smoke which came from the gunfire, I saw the puppy-dog mask agent stood on the other side of the shield, still firing like she thought it might tire me out and drop the shield.

“Go,” I called to the others.

Luther and Allison scrambled for one side of the room, toward the kitchen. It was something that we had done in our childhood training sessions and during real missions. I would place a protective shield and let them regroup somewhere to make a plan and they would usually swing around from the other side, ambushing the criminals. It had always worked for us and that was what made me confused as to why Diego had stayed.

“Go,” I said again. “I can handle this, Diego.”

“Your arm is bleeding,” he told me.

I glanced at my right arm. In the bluish-toned light of the room, it was hard to tell, but a dull glint in the fabric showed that he was right. I had ruptured the stitches and I could not even guess when it had happened; perhaps in the fall, perhaps while using astral energy to punch that agent.

“Help the others,” I said.

He hesitated a second longer but then nodded, lips held in a tight line. He ran after Luther and Allison and I cracked my neck, loosening out the heaviness in my joints. I was not quite as cocky as Five but I could not say, either, that I was doubtful of the damage that I could do to two Commission agents now that I was focused and ready for them. I could have waited for the others to come around for that ambush but I also felt that this was my own fight to win, given they were here for me and Five. I crouched behind a sofa and waited, hearing the faint padding of shoes against the rugs.

In one sweeping drop, the shield disappeared like a curtain falling to the ground.

I peeked out and glimpsed the bear-mask agent wandering around the cabinets, picking up figurines, examining the mounted birds and the collection of bugs in their frames. He grabbed a military flail and weighed the spiked ball in his hand, seeming pleased with its hefty swing. For a little bit of satisfaction, I wrapped the ball in astral energy and swung it at his own mask, which made a dulled thump and knocked him back into the cabinet, shattering shards of glass onto the ground.

I stepped out as he shook it off. “Whoops,” I grinned.

Once more, his strength was impressive. He could take a hit and strike right back, recovering faster than I thought he could, twisting the flail in his grip and aiming for me. I could dodge it easily, ducking and darting, though there were many small bits of furniture around the room that I had to hop around, even stepping onto the coffee-table and jumping off when he took another swing.

I mimicked Diego and put up my fists, wrapping them in astral energy, like gloves. When I ducked for another swing, I rolled to hit him in the ribs and the flail swayed heavily back and forth as he toppled sideways. I threw another hit and then another. I got him once in the face but that mask spared him a broken nose. I was certain that if I could get it off him, he would be much easier to take down, because little digs on his ribs and arms seemed only to slow him but not stop him.

I figured it was best to do what I had done in the diner and slam him against a wall until he moved no more. I reached out with my left hand and focused on his ankles first but a voice called out from the hall and made hot fear curl within my stomach.

“Hello? Guys? Is everyone okay?”

I looked away for a split second. It was something we had been trained never to do in missions yet I did it then, frantically seeking her out in the dim light of the room to warn her.

The flail made a clinking sound on its chain as he rocked it toward me. I had barely enough time to protect myself by putting a weak, half-formed shield between myself and the spiked ball but it forced me hard against the tiles and I banged my head against the coffee-table. It was not a hit that would have knocked me out but he followed it by pressing his foot onto my right-arm, on the wound, perhaps having seen the sticky patch of blood on that sleeve. I did not scream but the sound that came out was choked, like the sounds that Allison had made earlier, stars sparking in my eyes, teeth sinking into my tongue to hold it in.

He then gave one hard kick to the underside of my jaw and I felt my skull rattle. Still, it was not enough to kill me nor enough to throw me into unconsciousness – though with how my jaw ached, I thought it would have been much appreciated if he had.

He moved away from me.

I turned onto my stomach, one hand pressed against my bleeding arm and the other touching my jaw tenderly. When we were children, we had been thrown around like this all the time – not only by criminals but in training sessions. Maybe that was what made me struggle onto my knees and try to stand; nothing new, though it had been a long time since I had last fought with this much hand-to-hand combat. Already the pain was numbing, fading out and fading in again, like my body could not fully understand if it was supposed to be hurt or not.

Vanya walked into the room, eyes wide. “Astrid, are you –…”

She dropped to the ground, dodging the agent who aimed for her with that flail. He punched her onto the coffee-table and I felt a mad, frantic anger propel me forward, leaping across the coffee-table, stepping over Vanya who curled into a ball.

I tackled him.

If I had not wrapped myself in more astral energy, it would never have worked. He was stronger than I had first thought but with that energy, I crashed into him and drove him back into the lobby. I heard his pained grunt, his attempt to push me back, thinking that he was up against a little girl with weird powers but nothing more – his head cracked back against the wall when we finally stopped and he slumped onto his bottom.

Though the mask hid his face, I imagined he was too dazed to even grasp what he hit him.

“You stay the Hell away from her,” I spat at him. Pain waded to my jaw again, disappeared, flared again. I rubbed at it, tasting blood. The swelling of my tongue made my words slack and muddled. I looked at Vanya. “Are you okay?”

“I was about to ask you the same thing,” she said, smiling faintly as she touched the blood on her forehead.

Behind me, there was a loud grunt and I thought, _this guy will just not stay down_ –…

Brandished in his fist, coming down fast, spiked ball shining in the light, the flail was poised to slam into my cheek, but its wooden end was gripped and I stared at Luther with a stupid, awe-stricken surprise as he quite literally gripped that wooden part and _lifted_ the agent along with it, sparing me. He tore the flail from the agent’s hands and cast it aside, letting it clink onto the tiles and roll away.

The agent hauled Luther up into his arms and dropped him to the ground, but even from the tiles, Luther kicked and fought and threw that agent back again and again until he tripped and crashed into the staircase.

I could hardly let Luther take the credit for getting rid of these agents, so I helped him stand and stood alongside him.

“Sucker-punched you, huh?” he groaned, nodding at my face. He brushed down his shirt, stretching his neck from side to side.

“Obviously,” I muttered; the word was heavy with a rasping lisp from my swollen tongue.

“Okay, Daffy.”

I glared at him but soon that agent was coming right at us and left no chance for jokes. I had nothing around me that I could throw at him other than that flail but Luther had broken its handle, so I launched the spiked ball at him and he only barely missed it. It wedged itself into the wall behind him. They really had sent their best agents after us and it was angering me more and more.

I slammed him with one wave of astral energy and it made him drop to his knees, where Luther could grind his foot into his chest and keep him down until the agent kicked out of the hold. Luther rocked back but quickly caught himself. The agent threw a knife from his pocket and it sliced past Luther, barely missing his ear. The knife stuck out from the wooden bannister of the railing and I realised he had stolen one of Diego’s own knives, having likely found it on the ground in the main room. If anything pissed off Diego, it was having his own knives stolen from him and then used against himself or against us.

“Vanya,” Luther shouted, “get out of here!”

I was gaining on the agent, hitting him faster than he could strike me and putting astral energy around any part of me that he tried to jab in return. Having thrown him against a column with another wave of astral energy, I glanced at Luther.

“And you thought I couldn’t take hand-to-hand combat.”

“That didn’t count,” he grunted.

“Yes, it did.”

“No, it didn’t.”

He intercepted the fist that the agent swung at me, twisting his arm. The agent yelped and fell to the ground.

“See,” Luther said. “I’m not using astral energy. Pure strength and training.”

“You’re not using astral energy because you _can’t_ use it, idiot,” I huffed. I imitated what the agent had done to me earlier and stomped on his wrist. “And when I _do_ use it, I’m as strong as you anyway.”

“You’re only _just_ as strong as me.”

“That is such bullshit –…”

The agent had another throwing knife somewhere under the leg of his pants, which he tore out and slashed against Luther’s calf.

Luther reared back and bent to clutch at the fabric as if he was mortally wounded. His reaction was so unlike him that I wondered if there had been poison on the knife or if he had been cut more deeply than it seemed to me. I took one step over to him but felt my hair gripped, the side of my head twisted to slam into the column closest to me. I heard colours and saw noises, the whole world jumbled and spun around.

I crashed to my knees and felt the throbbing of my own skull as if the bone had splintered and come apart, spilling out what was left inside, but really it was simply the immediate pain, which would fade if my body kept up its inability to determine what was happening to me. My eyes rolled. Something flashed overhead, running across the hall, toward the bedrooms. The hair was red.

It was the last colour that I saw, because the world then turned blue, electric blue, like the colour of those portals that Five made.

I was surrounded by them, as if they knitted together. I scrambled away from them, terrified that I would fall through and again be taken to that apocalyptic world, but there was nowhere that the blue colour did not touch. It was seeping between the furniture and pooling between the arched gaps in the railings and finally bubbling up between the tiles. I touched my temple, felt blood, wondered if this was some kind of concussion or if I was simply broken, my programming degraded.

 _Mint would brighten the walls_ , I thought absently. _What happened to her is happening to me_ ; _what happened to me is happening to her._

I blinked and it was over. The blue had faded and there was Luther, motionless on the ground, the agents gone.

I was hauled up, two arms slipped under mine to help me find my balance. Diego delicately moved my head, turned me left, turned me right, up and then down, examining my jaw. He clucked his tongue against his teeth and said, “Think you’ll be okay. But you look a little funny from the bruising that’s coming for ya. Well, funnier-looking than usual, that is.”

I rolled my eyes at him, smiling despite myself. “Is Luther all right?”

At the sound of his name, Luther stirred and pushed himself up with the help of Allison. Even Diego, despite all his anger, stooped to draw him up from the ground, kindly brushing off the dirt and blood that stuck to his coat. They stood at either side of him and I leaned against the wall, feeling the click of my jaw as I opened and closed my mouth.

“You gotta cut down on that fast food, soldier,” Diego huffed, taking most of Luther’s weight on his shoulder.

Without warning, Luther threw them both aside and the snap of a chain lashed through the lobby; the chandelier crashed down on top of him. He had saved Allison and Diego and lay under the glass and metal. The room was dark, only faint orange lights dotting the walls behind us. The chandelier breathed a misty shade of blue, dwindling, losing its strength. It faded entirely and I found my bearings, using the column to heave myself up.

“Luther?” I called out. “ _Luther_!”

Holding out my hand, I helped him shift the chandelier with astral energy. He stood and glass shimmered off his shoulders and arms, crunched beneath his large boots, stuck to the rug and ground into its strands as he wobbled to his feet. He had a large cut above his eyebrow which dribbled blood down his cheek, onto his jaw, where it drooled further onto his shirt – its cuff caught on the rounded edge of the chandelier, pulling off the shirt the more that he stood.

Strange tufts of dark fur peeked through the first drop of his sleeve until the shirt had been fully torn off. Allison and Diego gaped at him and I knew that I was not alone in seeing that his torso resembled that of an ape. Luther was already a giant even when bundled in his coat and gloves. Without those to shroud him, he seemed even bigger, his chest morphed into what seemed like a hardened shell.

“Holy shit,” Diego breathed out.

It was not just tufts of fur. It was long black fur all along his arms, stopping around his torso, and that fur seemed to shame him most of all as he glanced between us, his face raw with hurt and embarrassment. But of us all, he looked at Allison for the longest, his face crumbling, his fists scrunched and blood tickling between his fingers. Had I not been smacked against a column and had it not been such a shock, I might have found kinder words. Instead, I stared dumbly at him and he took off for the stairs. He pushed around Diego and his thumping steps echoed loudly. 

The lights of the chandelier flickered out and died in one last bleat of pure light. 

“Mom,” Diego said.

I heard her humming and followed after him. I was slow and though the pain had momentarily gone, it did not mean that I could run like Diego. The staircase hindered me considerably and I found him crouched alongside her on the chairs where we had looked at paintings together and finished our embroidery. I lowered myself to my knees on her other side, shakily taking her hand in mine. She seemed unharmed but Diego drew my eyes toward the thick white thread that stitched her wrist.

She had been sewing through her own flesh and not felt it, had not even noticed it all.

“Astrid,” he murmured. “I think…”

“No,” I said thickly. He wanted to switch her off. “ _No_ –…”

“I’m here,” he said, his voice was choked. “We can do this together, all right?”

He was asking too much of me yet he was caving beneath the gravity of it, too. Slowly he held out his hand toward me and I took it, feeling it tremble like mine. He did not want this anymore than I did but he needed a blessing, needed somebody to tell him that it was all right. I swallowed blood from the lining of my gums and nodded.

He peeled her wrist open, showed its sparking wires, its circuity whirring and flashing and seeming, for all the world, like it worked perfectly fine. But it was not working and it showed in her butchered embroidery.

“Diego?” she asked. “What are you doing?”

“Helping you,” I answered.

Her right hand was held between mine. Neither cold nor warm. Like me, she could never quite decide which she was supposed to be. She tilted her head at me. The circuitry in her wrist flowed like synapses blooming in the brain, little dots of blue wavering up and down her forearm,

“Astrid, darling, we have more embroidery to do later,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

“It’s gonna be _o-_ -…”

Diego stuttered on the word.

She smiled at him. “Remember what we worked on. Just picture the word in your mind.”

“It’s gonna be okay, M-Mom.”

He pulled at one wire and found that small, minute switch in her wrist that turned her slack and vacant, smiling blandly at the paintings. The little dots in her wrist sparked a light colour and dimmed. He left before that light could dim, storming off for the bedrooms. I sat with her hand still limp in mine.

She had flickered out and died in one last bleat of pure light. 

▬

Five had left his bedroom door open and I crawled into his bed, staring blankly at his window whose curtains remained open. I rifled through his drawers and found his needle and thread. I stitched my own arm, this time. I patted it down with plasters decorated in cartoon trains. I had no ice for my jaw. I did not care to find it, either. I was tired but not from slack of sleep, though my eyelids fluttered shut against their dry, sore redness. I heard Vanya tap at the door to tell me that she was leaving but I could not say if I answered her. No-one came to wish me goodnight or tuck the sheets around me. Some part of me had expected it. Even after all those years and all that had happened tonight, I had still expected it.

And I had so badly wanted it, too.

But it was me, in a bed, alone, curled into myself and thinking that it had been much nicer when I could not feel at all.

▬

In the dream, I was in a spaceship, and in the spaceship, there was a small square of glass which showed the Earth like a splotch of bluish-green dabbed onto a canvas of otherwise pure black paint. I was sitting in a cockpit, tapping at buttons which winked at me and turned green, blue, harsh red. It was hot all around me, scorching heat which pooled me in sweat and bubbled the sealing along that little window of glass. I pressed another button and heard myself speak through a mask which had turned white with the heat of my breathing but the words seemed to whistle down the tubing attached to the mask so that it became lost and muffled.

I tapped at more buttons. There was a sudden whine of staticky noise crackling through the intercom somewhere and that, too, was wasted on me because I could not understand it. I stood from my padded chair, wishing desperately that I could yank off the helmet around me but my hands reached for it and found nothing there but the dampness of my skin, my hair stuck against my cheeks aflame.

The spaceship tilted. I looked at that square of glass and saw that I was hurtling toward Earth. The buttons burst, the panelling from around the spaceship peeled and fled into the blackness, the pressure built up so intensely that I thought I would combust.

Somehow, in all that, the staticky crackle of sound cleared enough that I heard him say: _please don’t go again._

▬

_Goodnight, little astronaut._

▬

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> did i warn you. i did!!! 
> 
> episode 3 is big sad energy and when i watch luther sometimes i want to just smack him hahah. i go between loving him and just getting annoyed. well, i tried to answer some questions while also giving some more >:) not a lot of five but he does come up in the next chapters, it's just he goes off to stake out meritech this ep and the latter half is dedicated to that great cha-cha/hazel versus luther allison and diego fight. 
> 
> again, im rambling. i hope you all enjoyed. x


	6. five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hey guys!! surprised to see me! 💗💗 i bet. im adding extra hearts for this A/N because tomorrow is valentine's day and you bet i'm gonna eat chocolate (as opposed to any other day lol). 
> 
> anyway i would like to explain what took me so long. you can skip this because it's not related to the chapter itself, i only wanted to apologise. same reasons that afflict most people who write on this site i imagine - college work and this c-stuff making things harder and generally finding it tough to be indoors 24/7 and feeling the pressures of work always looming!! 
> 
> so guys, i hope you're all doing well. i'm so sorry it took me so long to get this up and i always try to keep a schedule but i have been finding things tough lately. no surprise, i imagine most of the world feels the same way. if you do too, i hope things get better and again here are some valentine's day hearts for you 💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗💗
> 
> all the best,  
> kaiseriin x

☂️

Number 8

“number eight”

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

_after: five_

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Perched at the edge of Five’s bed, I held my pocket-watch in my palm, toying with it. I dropped it and caught the end of its chain before it could fall to the floorboards, letting it twirl dully back and forth in my grip. Then, I held it out in front of me, focused on its beige clock-face. It levitated out from my hold, floating in thin wispy tendrils of astral energy.

In a sudden rush of frustration, I pulled apart the pocket-watch, those wisps hardening into needling tentacles which wrapped around the casing and tore it off. The energy blew from me like a ring of smoke, an echo so powerful that it billowed the curtains, wobbled the toys and books on the shelf near the wardrobe and finally slammed Five’s door shut.

I ripped away its black ticking hands and still they turned, uselessly, reading a time which was not there. I plucked each wheel and cog that only yesterday I had so carefully slotted together, letting them float in balls of astral energy. I felt that I would implode, that I would be set alight in rage, if I did not do this to the watch. Pogo had not told me that Reginald turned off the machines, the agents had come to the house, the Commission was closing in –…

It was like water, flooding in, filling up the room.

I spun the watch-face in frantic twirls in front of me until it blurred and I could not tell what time it had been nor what time it would be and that felt much like it had done in the apocalypse; to not know what hour it was and not know how much time we had lost until, suddenly, it was right there in front of us. 

The delicate parts of the pocket-watch fell together again, slipping into place. I had repaired it in one stroke of astral energy. It ticked soundly. It told me that I was still here even if sometimes I did not feel like it. It told me that there was too much to be done for tears and sadness.

Finally, it told me that there were five days left before the apocalypse.

▬

The house had not yet roused itself. Mom was sitting, alone, in front of those paintings, where she had been left overnight. Her head lolled as if her neck had been broken, her eyes glassy and blank. They glinted like the shards scattered around the broken chandelier at the end of the staircase. I sat beside her, peering up at those women captured in oil-based paint, faces pale and disinterested.

I thought, _the world is like a painting and I can see its frame_.

I picked up the embroidery that she had left behind. I smoothed my fingertips across the wobbly black circle that she had stitched. I found blue thread and started to pull it through that black circle to make a lonely ballerina, her tutu smoother this time around, her arms slim like the neck of a swan and lifted above her head, which was less blobby.

From the lobby below, I heard a sigh and the sound of glass being swept. Between the railings, I could see Allison, dressed in a casual sweater and sneakers. She dragged a brush back and forth, stooping to clean the shards from the chandelier. She had only cleaned a section. She glanced at the rest of it and sighed again.

I finished the embroidery and left it there alongside my mother, wishing that she might turn her head and tell me that it was beautiful, like she had done for all the other treasures that I had brought her. But she remained still.

I remembered a mannequin, tilted in a red wagon, smiling blandly at me with lips just like hers.

▬

Allison had moved into the main room of the house, picking up books with broken spines and sweeping the shattered glass there, too. The cabinets had been smashed and stuffed birds littered the Persian rugs. I almost stepped on the glittering shell of a beetle torn from its frame. Its wooden sides had been cracked.

She noticed me in the archway and continued to collect the books, stacking them on the coffee-table. I crouched and picked up those beetles, lining them in rows beside the books. It was a little odd to watch Allison clean the mess that the agents had made of the house, though it seemed she was preoccupied and simply needed something to do with her hands.

Eventually, she dropped three heavy books onto the stack, making me look up at her in surprise. She blurted out, “I know about the memory-loss.”

I glanced away from her. Beneath the sofa was a scarab beetle, its black pointed head poking out, as if it hid from us. Its frame had been lost, someplace. It might never find it again.

“Vanya told me,” she continued, fiddling with the cuff of her sweater. “Please, don’t blame her. It was three against one. I should have known something was wrong. I mean, you seemed so _distracted_ , that day you woke up. But Luther said you were always like that, like –…”

She trailed off, chewing at her lip.

“Like what?” I prompted.

“Like you were always in a daydream,” she said finally. “And I could never tell when you would come back to us.”

_our mother liked to say that astrid had one foot in this world and one foot in another_

Allison had never been a wallflower but she shrunk from me then. She turned to pick up the rusted vintage guns which had fallen from the cabinet. She nudged them together. I said nothing and did nothing, because I was too struck by what she had said, for all its simplicity.

In this house, we had been taught not to discuss things – things which bothered us and hurt us and afflicted us even then, as adults, things which we could not name more clearly than that because we had never been taught the words that might help us speak aloud and say: _this aches, this stings, this is not a wound on my skin but it hurts_.

So, we never talked about anything; not about what might have made Diego stutter like he did and Klaus ruin himself with chemicals and Luther sit in his childhood bedroom even when the others had left as soon as they had turned eighteen.

Allison found another beetle near the sofa and turned its shell toward the light. It sparked silver. I thought of an old, forgotten monocle. I could not place it and rubbed at my eyes like that might wipe the dust from my recollections. It came to me, weak and watery, that Reginald had worn a monocle and then I could recall the coldness of a wall against my back, lined up against it for an inspection. These memories pricked at my palms like astral energy, like touching nettles and soon feeling those whitish bumps that bloomed on red, sore hands. It went deeper. It _hurt_.

“They were here for you and Five, you know,” Allison said. “It would help a lot if we knew why.”

Though I had not realised it, I had been staring blankly at the wall ahead of me, unseeing, like my mother had stared at paintings without seeing the delicate strokes of acrylic paint, colour-blind to those subtle tones and hues, not even aware of the frames around them. But I drew my eyes to Allison.

_Astrid was in another daydream_ , that was what showed in her knowing stare, a resignation breathed out in the sigh that followed. It was another feeling in me for which we lacked the right words, so we settled for others: the splitting, the daydreams, the sense of being in two worlds at once.

I said, “You got hurt because of us, Allison.”

“And you could have _died_.”

“Lived a long enough life. Well, at least my astral projection did.” I smiled at her glare. “It was a joke.”

“After last night, you so do _not_ get to make jokes.” She picked another book and sighed, turning its cover so I could read the title: _The Extra-Ordinary Life of Number Seven_. She placed it atop the others. “Well, looks like Vanya sent us all a copy after it came out. I wanted to burn mine and pretend it never existed. You read it, right?”

“Never realised I was such an asshole. Always figured that was Five’s thing.”

She laughed. “Oh, I _knew_ I was an asshole. I just didn’t want the rest of the world knowing it, too.”

“I think you’ve changed.”

She shook her head. “No, I haven’t. But I’m trying.”

I watched her for a moment, like I had watched Klaus and Diego and the others; taking in what I had missed in those sixteen years that made them seem so familiar yet so strange all at once. I sensed something heavier in her meaning and I wondered if it had something to do with her child, a little girl.

I had read about her and my brow scrunched in concentration – her name had been in the book, the book that Vanya had written and that I had spent _years_ reading and reading, over and over again, whose pages flit in front of me as if it was in my hands, but the inky spots smudged some pages until I saw –…

“Claire.”

I had spat out the name, my own mouth having betrayed me and morphed itself around the sounds without my wanting it. Allison had been studying another small beetle, its black shell glinting in her grip. She placed it carefully into the frame where she had found it, its wooden edges splintered and snapped as if it had been smashed beneath a boot. She rose to her full height to face me.

“What about her?”

“I remembered her,” I said hoarsely. I cleared my throat, tried again. “I remember. Vanya wrote about her.”

Allison was like a statue. “Right,” she said, breaking through the marble to grit out that one word.

“You should bring her here. It would be nice to meet her.”

“So she can be here when _another_ bunch of masked freaks attack this place? No, thanks.”

Her words reddened my cheeks. It had been a stupid suggestion.

“Right,” I echoed.

“Look, Astrid – just –…” She touched her forehead with one hand, the other balanced on her hip. “Things have been rough, lately. Could we talk about something else? Literally a _nything_ other than Claire?”

Before I could even answer, she moved roughly about the room and threw bloodied cushions onto the sofa, collected the stuffed birds that had flown further from the coop and landed near the bookshelves, dropping them unceremoniously onto the coffee-table and knocking a few books into a sloppy pile. She cursed and finally slowed, flopping onto the sofa, ignoring the birds and books and whiskey bottles, whose contents Klaus had long since guzzled on his own behind the bar.

“You should change, Astrid,” she said tiredly. “You still have blood on you.”

Startled, I looked down at my shirt and saw that she was right. Some small part of me panicked and thought perhaps my stitches had ripped too. I sidled for the arch and hesitated there, glancing back at her. She had closed her eyes against the sunlight streaming through the sheer curtains. I opened my mouth to tell her about the agents and the Commission and the turmoil churning in my stomach that the apocalypse would happen no matter what we did and no sound came, because I spotted that reddish mark on her throat where the agent had strangled her.

“Sorry, Allison.”

I left before she could answer, because I had not been taught how to say things more profound than that.

▬

There were no blazers left in my wardrobe. Perhaps there were some in the laundry-room, still damp from where my mother had left them to dry. She would have ironed them, had her machinery not failed her. Had we not failed her, she might have brought them here, smoothed them of lint and placed them neatly on the railings. I could have taken blazers from the other rooms because the uniforms had been hoarded like all the other useless things in this house which filled it in clutter.

But I found myself changing into a fresh shirt and skirt and knee-high socks with automatic hands, buttoning, zipping, all without thinking. I took a coat from Klaus’ room, army-green in colour and dotted in cigarette burns here and there. It draped around me and brushed my knees, its shoulders drooping, its sleeves rolled to the elbow because it was too long for me.

Somewhere in the fight or in a fit of sleep I had lost the daisy-patterned clip in my hair and went back into my bedroom for another. I was clipping it against my hair when I turned toward the bed and saw that chameleon on my blankets, curled tail pinned with a folded note. I climbed onto the bed and reached for it, yanking the needle that held it in place. It must have been taken from the embroidery kit, a bare inch of black thread still knotted through one end.

I unfolded the note, reading its harsh black letters: MEET ME AT ASTOR STREET – NOON. BRING WATCH FOR INFORMATION ON AGENTS.

▬

Allison had left. She had knocked the neat stack of books and the little pile of foreign beetles. I rushed between rooms, hoping that I might find her again but there was no-one around. I skid into the lobby and crushed glass as I sprinted for the front door and ran into the alleyway for a car. But there were none left. I kicked at the dumpster and yanked my watch out from my pocket. I had less than twenty minutes and Astor Street was across town.

I walked out onto the street and glanced around, spotting a bicycle chained to a post. It was gaudy, painted a bright white colour with pink tassels streaming from either end of the handlebars, its pink basket decorated with flowers, its left bar adorned with a small bell. Even the helmet had been left dangling from its seat.

I hesitated, imagining the child who owned it returning to find it had been stolen. But the options were limited; it was either steal the bicycle or let the world end. So I stole the bicycle. It was one crime to add to a long list of others. I wrapped my hand in astral energy and gripped the chain, squeezing until I felt it snap and pull away.

I grabbed the bicycle, hopped onto its seat and slung on its helmet, though really I had little need for it. I pumped on the pedals as fast as I could and weaved between strangers on the sidewalk, dipping around corners and moving on muscle-memory toward Astor Street, which was less than ten blocks from the house.

Once there, I hopped off and led the bicycle alongside me. I was becoming a little more fond of it. I had never had a bicycle like it – never had a childhood which allowed plastic flowers and pinkness and frills.

I wandered back and forth along the street. It was full of cafés; strangers chatted and laughed and sipped at steaming cups, schoolchildren passed in twos and threes with arms linked, dogs sniffed at one another while owners paused at nearby magazine stands. I waited, the bicycle leaning against my side. Everything was normal. It was all birdsong and world turning and the quiet ticking of watches all around. I was not sure what I should have been looking for until it tapped me on the shoulder and I turned, lifting the helmet which dipped forward and bumped against the bridge of my nose.

It was Pruitt.

She stood in the middle of the street, her collarbone bruised in tones of brown and yellow, her left eyelid held in a tight squint from a punch that had clearly sealed it shut. She seemed out of place, like all the world moved around her but she could do nothing more than watch it, trapped, looking out from the peepholes of another birdhouse. She cocked her head and held out her hand. It did not escape me that Pruitt had glanced at the tassels on the bicycle but I could not tell if she liked them or not. It was hard to tell what Pruitt thought at all.

I pulled my pocket-watch out but held onto it, eyeing her doubtfully. In return, she held up a small note. I had become paranoid, confused too, because this all seemed too simple and too strange. She had no reason to want a plain old pocket-watch but it seemed she could not take her eyes from it. I was not sure that it was a trap either, given too many people were around and even Pruitt did not seem willing to take the risk of attracting that kind of attention to herself.

“I will hand this to you and we will go our separate ways,” I said.

She nodded. I waited another tense few seconds before I did what I had said I would.

I dropped the pocket-watch into her hand and she pushed the note into mine and we moved apart, pushed by an unseen force. It was quick and abrupt and I thought that I would be peppered with gunfire or poisoned or stabbed and my eyes flashed between the strangers passing me on that street – but nothing came. I walked back to the bicycle and touched its helmet, which felt cold in the shade from the building behind me.

Glancing behind myself just once, I saw that Pruitt had not followed and so I opened the small note, across which she had written: HAZEL AND CHA-CHA ARE THE ASSIGNED AGENTS – STAYING AT 225 LUNA MOTOR LODGE MOTEL, CALHOUN – THEY TOOK NUMBER FOUR.

▬

It was growing dark. The streetlights bloomed ahead of me, orange lights marking each spot that I passed, pumping madly at the pedals. There was something else that I remembered from the apocalypse and that was its stars; pure, powerful white stars in a blanket of otherwise complete darkness, because there had been no orange streetlights drowning out the skies overhead, not an ounce of light other than the flashlight that Five had carried until his batteries had run out. It was a faint, murky memory which passed quickly through my mind, because I was panicking.

I was terrified that Klaus would be dead already – that I would run to that room and in it, I would find his corpse, pale and motionless and knowing that it had been my fault he was there, mine and Five’s, who had put them all in danger and who had not done enough to protect them. It brought a stinging pain to my eyes and I felt tears dry against the wind which whipped against my cheeks. I could _feel_ it.

I was cycling dangerously, swerving onto the road if too many strangers crowded the sidewalk and blocked my path, ignoring the honk of cars and the irritated shouts. I could not think of anything but Klaus – that is, until, the streetlights flickered from orange to dull, muted grey.

I skidded, heart thumping, one foot pressed down against the sidewalk to hold me in place. It was the sensation that I was being split again, but so much worse than it had been before. I pushed off the bicycle and it toppled, smacking flatly against a puddle. I stumbled into the nearest alleyway and collapsed to my knees. I tried to catch myself, putting one hand down to soften the fall, but I fell again – for my hand had turned to astral energy and slipped like smoke through the asphalt.

In an echo, from somewhere ahead, I heard Five ask, “Would you pick this place over Griddy’s?”

Frightened, my head shot up, eyes darting around to look for him between the dumpsters, which paled into purple and lightened to a powder-blue and back again. The world was draining in colour and I could do nothing to stop it. I watched the puddles mutate into inky black pools and the asphalt itself was green and the clouds molten orange.

All the world was shifting and I was dying. I was sure that I was dying because I breathed in hard rasps and I could no longer feel my hands, no longer feel the clench of my fingers, because they had turned to tendrils of astral energy and I was turning too.

_I_ was fading.

I was still wearing that stupid helmet and had not realised it until it touched the bridge of my nose and I could not pull it off. I fell, onto my bottom. The helmet tilted back and I could see more clearly along the length of the alleyway, but its colours made no sense, each shade warping like they struggled to separate, as if paint had been sloshed together in a tin and the colours swirled around one another, about to blend but not quite capable.

I wanted to weep because I was frightened but the tears hardened and would not fall – just like they would never fall in my astral form and I thought, _no, no, I am not in my astral form, I am here, I am a-l-i-v-e_ –…

Then it ended. As suddenly and roughly as it had started, it ended.

I could stand, albeit with tremors running through my legs. I tipped back the helmet again and realised, quite dimly, that my hands had returned to me and the colours had, too. I picked up the bicycle by its handlebars but found I could not bring myself to climb onto it just yet, so thrown that I wobbled forward through the alleyway until I came to its mouth and only then could I pull myself onto the bicycle and numbly push forward.

I moved for Klaus. I moved because he needed me. But a part of me was afraid that I would not be able to move again if another splitting came, that I would be back in that bed for another sixteen years and I would feel every one of them pass because I was in my body, this time. The halves had been reconnected but I was still not right – still not _fixed_.

I had warned Five not to get his hopes up and think that I could be cured simply from slipping back into my body. I had told him not to believe that my memory-loss would solve itself and that I would become the old Astrid just like that, like the turn of a die, like the shifting tones of purple to blue. I had told him I might never be right again.

If I had been the one to tell Five, then why was I still so disappointed?

▬

Pulling into the parking-lot of the motel, I placed the bicycle at the side of the building and yanked off the helmet. I left it on its seat and rushed around to check the doors, squinting in the dim light to find their golden numbers. I glanced around myself, on the lookout for black suits and briefcases, the nape of my neck prickling like I was being watched.

But I could not tell if that was simple paranoia or if, somewhere in the shadows, an agent prowled ever closer. I had to climb a staircase and as I turned onto the landing, I saw that that room marked _225_ was already ajar. There was a figure standing at the threshold. I moved closer, feeling that numbness in my legs bloom so that I stumbled, touching the railings beside me.

It was Diego. He was looking into the room. I was sure that Klaus was in there. I was _sure_.

“Eudora,” he said.

I blanched, stomach dropping, mouth drying out so that I could not call for him when he ran into the room, lost in its shadowy depths. I took sluggish steps after him, stepping into the spot where he had been. I took in the room, not yet crossing its threshold, because I saw blood, trailing toward a body in the middle of the room.

It was Eudora Patch.

Even if I had never seen her or heard him say her name, I knew that it was her. Her badge was gold, speckled in blood spatter. Her eyes were closed. Diego touched her cheek and fell to her side. His face was ashen. He had never looked so much like he had as a boy, when Reginald had told him not to stutter; that we were not meant to cry or show weakness because we were too strong for that – we _had_ to be strong.

“No,” he said. “No, Eudora –…”

Sirens bloomed in the distance. I saw the flash of red and blue peeking between the buildings nearby. I felt such guilt for stepping around him and Eudora to check the bathroom, afraid that Klaus might be in there, injured and struggling to call out to us – blood spatter on his cheeks, too, blood pooling in the hollow of his collarbone like it did for Eudora.

But the bathroom was pale yellow and empty. He was not here.

I tried to touch Diego. He smacked my hand away and held Eudora closer.

“Diego, the police are coming. We need to leave.”

“I can’t leave her a-alone,” he whispered, drawing in a shuddering breath. “I can’t, Astrid, I can’t –…”

The sirens were loud, thunderously so. I had that dull throb right behind my forehead and I was close to pleading with him when suddenly those sirens seemed to penetrate his skull like they had mine. He fell back, bumping blindly against the dresser, nearly knocking over a pink box of doughnuts.

My heart clenched in fear at the small sticker on its side, which read: GRIDDY’S DONUTS.

“Diego,” I said carefully, “we need to go. _Now_.”

He snatched the receipt, his eyes narrowing. He looked at Eudora. Then, his eyes rose to mine and I turned cold. It filled my limbs, drawing bile to my mouth because he looked so betrayed, so spiteful.

“I parked downstairs,” he said. His tone was too calm. He did not ask what I was doing here but I felt it was coming, beneath that iciness, it was coming. “Go to the car and wait for me.”

“Diego –…”

“ _I told you to go to the damn car_!”

Flinching away from him, I did what he asked and moved quickly out into the hall, to the staircase. I had a shakiness in my legs as if I balanced on a ledge, looking down from a great height, feeling all that blood thundering in my eardrums. I could not wash Eudora from my brain either. I saw her body, her blood, mirrored in the puddles that splashed beneath my shoes. I saw her in the windows of the car, in its mirrors.

Finally I slid inside, slamming the door shut behind me, unable to think clearly enough. I jumped in fright when Diego climbed into the car and peeled violently out onto the street.

Seconds later, cop cars turned the corner and raced past us.

▬

Even though the car had long since parked outside the gym where he rented out the boiler-room, his knuckles bled white around the wheel. I had struggled to think of how to speak to him; It was not what I should tell him that bothered me but _how_ to tell him, because my mouth seemed not to want to form the words, my throat was so parched that I felt I would shrivel.

Droplets slithered down the glass of his window and he seemed to watch them, little bulbs of water. He was in a daydream. He was back in that motel, holding her.

Absent-mindedly, he wiped at his jaw and left a streak of blood. He saw it in the mirror and left it there, like an open wound of his own. He climbed out of the car and stalked to the gym. Before he could make it, he spun back and waited for me. I hovered close to him, wary that he would explode if I dared tread further.

Yet he spoke calmly, like he had in the motel room, which was much worse than if he had shouted or screamed.

“Were you there?”

I tried to match his calmness but a quiver in my voice betrayed me. “Where?”

He was watching me, cold stare alight against the neon sign behind him. “You know where. Griddy’s. The department store. That was you and Five, right?”

“Yes,” I answered. “Some agents found us –…”

“And how did you know about the motel? About the room? How did you _know_?”

“There’s another agent. Or she was an agent, I’m not sure. She told me – wrote a note.” I was floundering, struggling to get it all out in the right order. “I stole a bicycle, I was cycling here. I had a – a problem with my astral form. I was late.”

Diego threw his arms out, scoffing loudly. “Late,” he repeated bitterly. “If it had been Five in that room, you would have been a lot faster, no matter what came up.”

I recoiled from him, though we already stood apart. “And what’s that supposed to mean?”

The puddles glistened beneath him; the murky black water trembled as he stormed toward me, stooping so that he could look into my eyes, without the chance for me to hide from him.

“It means that you have _always_ cared more about Five. Ever since we were little kids, you had this stupid little fantasy in your head that you two would run away together, that you would leave the Academy. Real romantic. To Hell with the rest of us, though, right? What did we matter? Because you loved Five. You _still_ love him, no matter how screwed-up it is, no matter how damn screwed-up _he_ is – and you. You’re just as messed up as him.”

It stung badly. _This is his pain talking_ , I told myself, _his grief_. But it was more than that. It was all the pent-up rage that had started building the moment I left that house and leapt through the portal.

“He _wasted_ sixteen years of your life,” he continued. “He is the reason you were trapped up in that room, all because he was too cocky to listen to the old man when he told him that he couldn’t do something. And if it had been me jumping into the future, would you have followed? Maybe, maybe not. But I bet Five never had to doubt that you would.”

He let out a mean, bitter laugh that shivered right up my spine.

“The funniest part is that what you feel for Five isn’t love, Astrid. It’s _habit_. And a damn bad one, at that.”

I was biting my tongue between my teeth, grinding it like the glass had been ground beneath my shoes that morning.

“Habit,” he said again. “Because all you do is follow him around and fix his mistakes. You did it when we were kids and you’re doing it now, because it’s the only thing you know how to do. Hell, I do the same damn thing. Try to save you, try to save Klaus, try to save Mom. But that isn’t love. It isn’t supposed to be a tally of saving each other.”

Those words scratched at me like the silver cuts of light against the window behind him, like a monocle scraping and scraping at me and all my self-control was slipping away from me, like a golden chain that I had not managed to catch and which clicked against the floorboards. He moved away from me. It did nothing to squash the breathlessness in my chest, the sense of being surrounded.

“What would you know? You were raised in that house too, Diego,” I said.

Really, though, I wanted this all to end, for him to stomp off and cool down and let me think, because it felt like that pressure was building up in me as it had that morning, a heavy prickle in my palms. I touched my pocket-watch and tried to take comfort in it, but the guilt was swelling, the regret bubbling behind it.

“Yeah, and look how I turned out, right? Well, Eudora showed me how messed up our childhood was. How messed up our _lives_ are,” he spat. “And you know what else she did? Huh? She taught me that when someone loves you – I mean really _loves_ you – they don’t ask you to destroy yourself for their benefit. They don’t ask you to drown so they can stay afloat. They don’t ask you to do that. I used to think that was cheesy, used to think that she read it somewhere and she was just repeating it. But she was _right_. Five let you drown so he could stay afloat. He always said he was selfish. Guess he told the truth about one thing.”

I swallowed against the hardened knot in my throat. “I made a choice to follow him,” I said. “ _I_ made it, Diego.”

“God, you’re _still_ defending him.,” he snorted, shaking his head.

He took two steps toward the door and then rounded back again, as if he had wanted to drop it but it was pouring out of him.

“You didn’t choose a damn thing, Astrid. _Five_ made a choice and your only option was to clean up after him. And you’re denying it because you don’t realise how messed up our lives are. You know, other kids weren’t sent to fight criminals shooting up a bank. They weren’t asked to save hostages in a store. But I shouldn’t be so hard on you. Got your head all screwed up, didn’t you? That was Five’s fault, too. Seeing a pattern here?”

He took a few steps in a circle, aimless and restless, fists scrunching against the leather of his gloves.

“That isn’t fair,” I said weakly.

“You sound like Luther.” He sniffed, roughly rubbing at his nose and shaking his head. “Fairness, justice – you know who fought for that? _Eudora Patch_. She fought for that her whole damn life. She _believed_ in it, too. She believed in _me_ – and look where that got her.”

“You never could have predicted this, Diego. There was nothing that you could do –…”

“But _you_ could have done something. Those guys in the masks, they wanted to kill _you_ , Astrid. Eudora just happened to be there instead. The way I see it, it should have been _you_ in that motel room. At least you would have stood a chance against them.”

He leaned close again.

“What chance did she have?”

“I’m sorry.”

He ignored it.

“You know what Luther and I did today? We went looking for Five. We wanted to find him before those freaks did. Know where we found him? Drunk, in a library. While the rest of us were fighting for our lives, he got wasted. I told you – _selfish_. This whole thing is game to him, a power-trip. He doesn’t care about you, Astrid. You had to fight those agents, you had to clean up his messes, you had to suffer the most from his mistakes. He’s letting you drown.”

There was silence between us and I hated that he would not look away from me, that he was so _sure_ of himself when I was crumbling in front of him.

Because I could not think what else to say, because I had no defence, because I was not deserving of one, I said again, “I’m sorry, Diego.”

His scoff cut through me. “Right. Sorry. But not as sorry as Five will be.”

He stalked into the gym. I heard the door clatter shut behind him like it shot through me, woke me from a daydream – another daydream, head in the clouds, one foot in this world and one foot in another, head too _screwed up_.

After all that had happened, I was still that child Vanya had written about; selfish, oblivious, messed-up.

▬

Luther had brought the car around. Five was sitting in its passenger-side, pale-faced. Diego had not been kidding, because I recognised that greenish tinge to his skin. I had seen him recover from hangovers enough to know it. I sat in the backseat and Luther told me that Diego had slipped out through another exit in the gym. He also said that Five had told him everything that had happened in the apocalypse and what that Commission wanted.

I sank against the doughy seat, its shape lost with age. We cruised slowly through the street. Five watched me through the mirror. He had something on his lap. He pushed it through the gap in the seat to hand it to me. Its cover was worn, colours faded, the faintest outline of the astronaut still clear. It was not our copy because it was too clean; its inner-slip read PROPERTY OF ARGYLE LIBRARY.

I glanced up at him, meeting his gaze in the mirror. We were too tired and worn out to talk anymore. Luther tried to tune the radio.

Cyndi Lauper crooned through the static and he quickly turned it off.

▬

The wooden beam scraped against my shoulder and left a streak of dust behind. I brushed it off and sat at the window-sill, overlooking the garden. I pulled the book about the astronaut from my pocket and flipped to its first page, which had been torn from our copy. I skimmed through the information about its publication. It had been written in the sixties by a young author named Arthur Harrow in a period of cold-war paranoia, last checked out from the library a couple of months ago, its pages warm and ochre in colour.

I read the first chapter and had turned to its second when I heard the wooden beam shift.

Five stooped beneath it and stood on the other side of the room,. For once, he seemed unsure of himself, like he thought I might send him away. We said nothing and only watched each other. Then, slowly, he came toward me and reached out to cup my cheek, angling my face toward the watery blue light to check the purple line beneath my eyelid, the faintest bruising. His hand was warm, his touch was gentle.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Sorry that I wasn’t in the house when the agents attacked. Sorry that I didn’t protect you. Sorry that Eudora Patch died.”

I said nothing and his hand fell away, nodding like he had expected it. He slid onto the window-sill across from me and touched the shrivelled-up, blackened strip of wallpaper peeling in a heavy fold beside him. Idly he pulled at it, his face clouded. It was odd to sit in our old hide-out, in our thirteen-year-old bodies, with that childish fantasy of running away from home lingering in my mind. I looked at the loose plank beneath which we had hidden our treasures.

Diego was right. It had been nothing but a childish fantasy.

I asked, “Do you think we love each other, Five? Like – like _really_ love each other?”

The question startled him. He accidentally ripped too large a chunk from the wallpaper. It fluttered in a limp roll to the floorboards. Because Five had not been taught to talk about things either, he curled like that wallpaper beneath his shoes, furling in on himself. He swallowed, a thick bob of his throat, like the words had gotten caught right there where a mole marked his pale skin.

He almost had it; he almost spoke. But then he looked down at his lap and sighed and I knew that whatever it had been, it was gone.

“What kinda question is that, Astrid?”

“Just something Diego said earlier. Doesn’t matter.”

But it did matter. It was all that mattered. He knew it, too. Only the words had been lost, so he talked about something else.

“I was so close,” he said. “ _So_ close, Astrid. I went to MeriTech this morning. I brought that guy from the lobby, the guy we talked to. He was selling eyeballs on the black market. And I thought if I could just _get_ him there, I could find the buyer and know who ends the world. But the building was gone. It had been set on fire.”

“The agents?”

He ran a hand through his hair. “Probably. I thought I had it, that I would fix everything. I would make things right.”

“I was going to look for you.”

_all you do is follow him around and fix his mistakes_

I rubbed my eyes. “I was going to look for you,” I said again. “But I got a note, telling me to go to Astor Street at noon for information on those agents. It was Pruitt. She wrote a note to tell me where the agents were staying. They had Klaus.”

Five seemed surprised. “Klaus? Diego said they killed Patch. He never mentioned anything about Klaus.”

“The agents didn’t get me and they couldn’t find you,” I said. “So I guess they took Klaus as the next best thing. I’m not sure what brought Patch to that motel.”

He nodded, though his brow was furrowed in that way that said he was thinking hard, attempting to connect the dots even if he did not yet have all the pieces.

“Why would Pruitt help you?”

“She wanted my pocket-watch,” I said.

If it had been any other day, I might have laughed at how he frowned even more. “What for?”

“I don’t know. Nothing about this watch is any different from the others I’ve ever made.”

Five groaned. “Do things ever get _less_ complicated for us? Can’t we just go back to that week before I tried to time-travel?”

I let my legs dangle from the edge of the window-sill, shifting around to face outward into the room. I kicked the heel of my shoe against the wall, a muffled thumping sound that resembled the ticking of a watch and I thought about that week he mentioned, which I remembered muddily. I felt the book about the astronaut cutting into the skin of my stomach from where it remained hidden in my waistband and thought it had all come down to that. If I had never found it, never given it to him – maybe things would have been different for us.

Luther was in the hallway, a few doors away from us. “Five!”

Five groaned again, more loudly. “And the day gets even better.”

“He might find the hide-out.”

Even if the room was empty and dusty, it was still ours and meant enough to us that Five relented and stood. He leapt through a sudden ripple of blue light, vanishing. He left the room dewy in the glow of his portal. I stared at it, somewhat memorised by its winding tendrils and wisps that resembled astral energy. I tried to recall that sensation of jumping through his portal, the first time that I had ever done it. It had been in this room.

It had felt like falling.

▬

I found Klaus in his bedroom. He was curled on his bed. Somehow, he seemed healthier than he had in days. His skin had a peachy tone, his hair was brighter and curlier. He was lying on top of his blankets but had not yet fallen asleep. I hesitated at his door, afraid that he might hold the kind of anger for me that Diego did. But when he saw me, he smiled, seemingly _glad_ to see me. He looked unharmed, too, not a scratch on him. Confused, I crossed the room and took the spot beside him.

“I thought those agents took you,” I told him.

“They did,” he said. “Got back here a half-hour ago. You can thank your friend for me.”

“My friend?”

“Red-headed girl, I don’t know,” he said. “Didn’t get much time to talk. She helped bust me out. But we got separated. Seemed she had some grudge with those masked guys. Think they knew each other?”

It was asked bluntly because he already knew. “Yes,” I answered. “I think they do.”

He hummed. “Well, she saved my ass. But then there was this detective and – look, Astrid, I just want to take a nap, all right? Could we do this later?”

Klaus never _wanted_ to sleep. He usually went to great extremes to avoid it, plugging himself with all sorts of drugs to stave off sleep. Yet he fluffed his pillows and snuggled further into them.

“I’m sorry,” I said hoarsely.

“Why?”

I gawked at him. “Because the agents _kidnapped_ you, Klaus. That’s why.”

Klaus shrugged. “Oh, that. It’s okay.”

I scooted away from him, balancing at the edge of the bed. “It’s _okay_?”

“Sure.”

Strangely, it felt much like it had days ago, in my room, laying down and looking at each other. He had lain beside me and we had talked before we play-fought and fell off the bed. Only there was no light-hearted mood, now. Instead, he seemed contemplative, though his eyes were heavy and tired. I doubted that the agents had let him sleep and so I felt a sudden guilt for disturbing him like I had. But I was struck by the oddly warm tone to his skin. His eyes were not bloodshot, his hands were not shaky, he looked _at_ me and not _around_ me.

“Klaus,” I started tentatively, “are you… all right?”

“Never better.” The strangest thing was that he sounded truthful. “I’m fine, Astrid. Just want a nap, like I said.”

“Okay.” I hesitated and said again, “Okay.”

I worried that he had only wanted to send me away but that had not shown in his face. He had truly wanted to sleep. I lingered outside his door and listened for sound. I heard nothing other than the soft bounce of his bedsprings as he turned. I sloped toward the staircase, daring to glance back at his door.

I wished, for what seemed like the hundredth time that day, that I had the words to say more than just ‘ _sorry_ ’.

▬

The chandelier was still broken, cracked on the ground. I was even more confused than I had been all day. Pruitt had helped Klaus – or at least, she had _tried_ to help him. But why? Why had she helped him and why had she wanted the watch when it was no different than any other she could find in a store? I had made it myself but it was otherwise a plain, beige-faced watch.

I stepped through the shards, wandering in an aimless circle around the chandelier. To make things worse, I did not know what had brought Eudora to the motel nor where the agents had gone nor what had caused the splitting that happened in the alleyway earlier.

I nudged some glass. Five was right to wish things would become less complicated for us, for all I saw were shattered pieces of what had once been whole and I was trying to glue them together.

“Astrid.”

It was Pogo who had spoken. He stood beneath the yawning archway which led into the kitchen.

He seemed older again, hunched forward and hobbling toward me with his cane tapping out each step, pushing aside stray glass. Slowing in front of me, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a pocket-watch of his own; his was shattered and crushed inward, so that it could not be opened, its chain gnarled and twisted.

I stepped toward him, the scuff of my shoes the only sound in all the house, which had settled into dust and loneliness like it had done for the last sixteen years. The casing had once been golden but had been dulled and marked. If we had made it together, then I could not remember it.

“My study has been destroyed,” he said quietly. “All the watches are broken; books torn apart, furniture smashed.”

I stared at him, throat tight and aching. I thought of Pruitt but I was not willing to tell him about her just yet. I feigned uncertainty, studying the pocket-watch, and asked, “You think those masked guys did it?”

“I spoke with Master Luther earlier,” he said. I heard something in his tone, something which drew my eyes to him and held them there because I did not like the sound. “He informed me that you were made aware of what had happened with the machines – of what happened with your heart. And that I had lied to you.”

“You hardly think _I_ would do this to your study?”

He did not answer. I felt the familiar lick of rage rolling up through my palms, like it had that morning in the bedroom, when I had ripped apart the pocket-watch for nothing more than a release. I was hurt and tired and smarting already. He was adding salt to wounds that had been here since childhood, festering and aching.

“I am aware that I have deeply broken your trust in not telling you about what Reginald did all those years ago,” he said. “Surely you must wonder why I did not tell you.”

“I didn’t destroy the pocket-watches, Pogo,” I told him. I wanted to ignore what he said about Reginald, about those machines. I had had enough for one day. “I would never hurt you like that.”

“But I hurt _you_ , Astrid. I know that with the pain of losing Grace, as well –…”

The mention of my mother sparked even more anger and it seemed there was nothing in this world but me and him. The chandelier had melted into the tiles, the archways had stretched upward to a point where I could not see them, swallowed in the blazing white that seeped into my peripheral and made it hard to tell him apart from all the rest of it. I had a lot of anger in me but I never meant for it to be directed at him.

But like Diego, it seemed to pour out on its own accord, before I could stop it. I was drowning in it. I did not want to talk about it, not after I had sat beside my mother and stared into cold blank eyes, not after learning that Reginald would have let me die in that bed, not _after_ –…

“Yet I lied to you,” he continued. “I have always considered myself different from Reginald in that respect but I lied to you.”

I swallowed against the hardened knot in my throat. “Stop it,” I said.

“I lied because I wanted to protect him,” he said.

Deflated, all that anger left me in a smoke-ring like it had in the bedroom that morning; only it was much more gentle, this time around, tinkling the glass which had not shattered from the chandelier and the curtains behind him ripped slightly, like a faint chill had rolled through from an open window somewhere. He seemed neither pleased that I had not done worse nor did he seem disapproving.

“Why?” I asked. “Why would you want to protect him?”

Pogo swallowed. “He was my friend – my master. He created me. He gave me many opportunities.”

“That’s it,” I said doubtfully. “That’s why you protected him?”

He hesitated. “Reginald believed that if your body was put in great peril, it would attempt to reconnect your astral form with your body in order to save itself. I did not agree. I had other theories. Theories about the pocket-watch, about sound and how it had previously demonstrated a profound impact on you while in your astral form. He was not willing to base your life on theories, Astrid. He wanted something practical.”

“I know you stopped him.”

“If I had waited a moment longer, I do not think you would be here in front of me as you are. But nonetheless, I have let you down. I should have told you about the machines. I should not have let you believe that those lapses were an unexplained phenomenon. I certainly should not have allowed you to think it was the result of anything _you_ had done.” He placed that mangled pocket-watch into his tweed coat. “For that, and so much more, I cannot apologise enough.”

I watched him warily. “You pushed me on purpose. Why?”

He straightened, his cane balanced in front of him. “I mentioned that Reginald believed you to be powerful, Astrid. I share this belief, as you well know.”

“So, what did you want to happen? You wanted me to destroy everything like you think I destroyed those watches?”

“I never once thought that your power stemmed from its destructive capabilities,” he said. “But rather from your _control_ over what has the _potential_ to be destructive. I also never believed you destroyed the watches, though I suspect you know who did, or at least have some inkling. You and Number Five are involved in something far greater than I first imagined. I worry for your safety. Have you had any other – complications?”

I thought about the changing colours in the alleyway; the sense of falling from the edge of frame, out from my painting and into another.

“No,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“So,” he said, “I truly have broken your trust.”

“What do you mean?”

“You are a capable liar, Astrid,” he said solemnly, “but you have never been capable of lying to me. I am afraid that, in breaking your trust, I have caused irreparable damage.”

I held out his pocket-watch. “You haven’t.”

He looked doubtful.

“We can make more watches,” I said. “We’ll replace them all. I’m going to see what they did to your study.”

Though I walked ahead, without ever glancing back at him, I could tell that he was watching me. I could tell that he knew I had no reason to check his study other than wanting to witness what had happened to it for myself, to sift through its destruction and know that it was another piece of collateral in what Five and I had started.

▬

The ground was mushy and soft. I stormed through the green doors and marched into his study, but the door jammed, caught on the piles of paper strewn about the floor, so that I had to squeeze through the gap. The lamp on his desk had been toppled and its yellowish light shone toward the broken pocket-watches scattered across the rugs, showing their wheels and cogs and forceps and chains all around.

I stepped across his books and crouched to lift the shards of the teapot, smashed against the floorboards. 

The pocket-watches ticked quietly from their mass grave beneath me; those of them that had not been fully broken, their casings not torn off or crushed. It was a soft and comforting sound that contrasted the ruins of his study. There were slashes in his sofa, its hollow frame peeking out between the slits in the fabric. I dropped the shards. I was very tired and wished I had taken a nap with Klaus. But there was not enough time for it anymore.

We were screwing up. It was no longer about fixing Five’s mistakes but running in circles to fix my own. What Diego had not quite understood was that I was as much to blame. Or perhaps he had understood it and tried to shirk everything onto Five because he did not want to think I was capable of causing him so much pain. But I had been capable. I had done more than he wanted to acknowledge.

In the mess, I saw Vanya’s book peering out. Its spine was heavily lined, like most books in here. Pogo must have read it more than once. It brought me another lashing of shame because he thought I was powerful and strong and I wanted nothing more than to curl up and ignore the world – to let it end.

Though even that was not true. I did not want it to end and I would do what I could to stop it.

So I shoved aside the pocket-watches, moved out into the hall and went back into the garden, intent on finding Five to make a new plan. We had to do _something_ because so far we were being hit from all sides. I saw the statue of Ben, my eyes skimming its words. I was still reading them when I heard the doors ahead open with a whine, turning on old hinges. I thought it might be Five and so I did not turn right away. I should have.

Then I might have seen Pruitt aiming for me, taking her shot.

I heard the crack and flinched, thrown by the sound which ricocheted through the garden and stuffed up my eardrums. I awaited pain but none came. She was yards from me, her face held in spite, the first expression that I had ever seen on her. She was still aiming, one hand clutching her gun and the other holding onto the pocket-watch that I had given her.

But it was not swinging on its chain – it was perfectly still. I thought it was happening again: another splitting, another turn from blue skies to mutated purple.

“Astrid, how wonderful to see you again. You look so… _corporeal_.”

The Handler stood behind me. She smiled, waggling her fingers at me. Five was standing beside her, his face stricken, his eyes on that bullet which hovered close to me but which remained suspended, moving in fractions. I stepped away from it, stunned, finally understanding that the Handler had stopped time, a briefcase in her grip.

“I have an exciting proposition for you both,” she said. “It could be just like old times. Right, Five?”

“Give us a minute,” he said tersely.

Her smile was tight. Her gaze drifted to Pruitt and down to the pocket-watch in her hand. “Interesting,” she murmured.

There was a faint pop of sound. She disappeared.

Without her, Five seemed a lot less tense. He marched across the grass and clamped his hands around my arms to pull me even further from that bullet. It had been aimed low, probably for my shoulder or arm. I doubted Pruitt would miss and found myself wondering if she had even wanted to kill me.

I shoved him off. I had seen the Handler as another one of his mistakes, something that I would feel forced to fix and if it had not been for what Diego had said, I might not have felt so strongly about it. But I had wanted _us_ to fix it – me and him, together, taking it as a team and accepting we had enough fault to share.

“What the Hell did you do?”

“We don’t have much time, Astrid,” he said. “For all I know, they’re still listening. So I need you to trust me and say you’ll accept the job she’s offering.”

“No.”

Five had smoothed his blazer and righted his tie. His hands stilled and he watched me, incredulous. “What?”

“No,” I said. “Not until you tell me how the Handler got here and why the Hell you would ever want us to work with her again.”

“Astrid,” he said, his tone dangerously close to scolding, which only set me off further, “she’s offering us a good deal here, one that could solve our problems. She could be back here any second and we don’t –…”

I was holding firm and he could tell. It brought a dimple to his cheek but not in a smile.

“ _Fine_. I found out that Klaus time-travelled. He stole the briefcase from those agents and he was gone for an entire _year_. I knew those agents would want their briefcase back so I had Luther take me to meet with them.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? I would have gone with you –…”

“I couldn’t find you.”

His jaw twitched, his eyes left mine and looked at the statue behind me. He was lying.

_Capable liar_ , I thought, _but never capable of lying to me_.

“I didn’t want to find you,” he grumbled reluctantly. “Because I already put you in danger. I already left you to fight those agents and I already ask enough of you and I’m afraid if I keep doing it, you’ll start to think –…”

“Think what, Five?”

“That we don’t love each other.” He did not look at me but angled his head in my direction. “I know what Diego said because he said it to me, too. At least, most of it. I imagine he used less expressive language when he talked to you.”

I sighed. “Five – …”

“That day in the apocalypse,” he said suddenly, “around the time we first got there. You heard Diego. Do you remember it?”

It was vague and blurred but I nodded.

“You could see him but I couldn’t,” he continued quietly. “You were running, trying to communicate with him. And I thought you would make it back. I _wanted_ you to make it back. I was running with you and I fell. You came back for me. Even though it was only a scraped knee, you came back for me.”

The sunlight haloed his silhouette. His face was momentarily lost to shadows.

“I don’t know how to describe love, Astrid,” he said. “You would think with all the poetry we read as kids that I could muster up something more but I don’t want to cheapen it by quoting dead poets. Just – when you came back and tried to help me even when you couldn’t, not in your astral form – I just mean –…”

He cleared his throat, his posture awkward and exposed.

“I don’t know how to describe it. But I know that I felt it then. I know that I feel it now. More than ever.” His shoulders softened and he finally looked at me. “The Handler is offering us positions in management at the Commission. I know that it isn’t what we planned or what we want. If you have any other suggestions, Astrid, I’m willing to hear them. But right now, it is the _only_ way I know how to keep everyone alive – to keep them safe. To keep you –…”

He trailed off and I could tell he was irritated, not only from the possibility of working with the Commission again, but because he had been too emotional. He clammed right up again, shoving his hands into his pockets.

“We’re running out of options and I had to think fast,” he said. “We take this job and the agents stop hunting us down. They stop threatening our family and we buy ourselves enough time to think about what we can do.”

“Fine.”

He blinked, surprised. I imagined he had expected an even longer fight but settled for drawing himself to his full height. “Okay.”

“But I have one condition.”

His eyes narrowed. “What?”

“She lets Pruitt live.”

“If we had been a second later, she would have shot you, Astrid,” he said flatly.

“She was aiming for my shoulder. She might have even missed. Do you really think someone like Pruitt would miss?”

“I don’t care,” he bit out. “She took the shot. Doesn’t make a difference to me.”

“She saved Klaus.”

He was torn. Finally, he said, “All right.”

“Good. Because if the Handler wants us to work for her, she’ll let Pruitt go.”

“Fine.” The Handler had reappeared and sat on the bench beside Ben’s statue. She cocked her head at me and smiled brightly. “I can let Pruitt off the hook. Give her another chance to run before she is – _inevitably_ – caught. Only so many chances a girl can get, right?”

Five met my eyes. He had been right to worry about her listening because we could never be sure that she ever really left us at all. But we had little choice and so I allowed her to approach me and hold out her hand. We shook twice. She had not stopped smiling once and on the second shake, she pulled me that little bit closer.

“Welcome back, Number Eight.”

▬

The offices within the Commission were a chorus of typewriters clacking and workers chatting and carts rolled to put stamped papers on desks. We walked at such a brisk pace that I could only glance into the rooms which passed us by. Even if my memory-loss meant that I was unsure of what I could retain, I tried mentally mapping out each twist and turn in the sprawling hallways.

I wondered if the Handler was purposefully taking a long route but soon she began calling out names for offices and workers alike, in a drone which showed she cared little for either. Five, though he presented a casual front with his hands in his pockets and a slouch to his frame, stayed close. Occasionally, he bumped his arm against mine; it was not an accident but rather reassurance. 

She led us down a hall which was painted in a powder-blue colour. At its end was a large wooden door, much larger than those around it. She opened it and I saw the tallest man hunched on a wooden stool, a loupe strapped around his head as he moved his forceps close to the rounded piece of glass on the table. He picked it up.

“Theodore,” she called.

He jolted and dropped the piece of glass. I caught it for him before it could shatter, holding it in a soft ball of astral energy. It was automatic and I had not thought about showing that in front of the Handler. Five kept his face blank, though the Handler smiled again. I had come to loathe that smile. I left the glass on the table and the man nodded his gratitude.

“Theodore,” she said again. “You remember Astrid, don’t you?”

It clicked that I _had_ met him. He stood, towering over all of us. But he held himself like a shy, quiet man, keeping to the other side of the room where the Handler might not reach him. He had been in the apocalypse – at its end. I could not remember too much beyond that.

“Astrid will be joining you,” the Handler continued. “I believe she has quite the expertise in this area herself. Come along, Five –…”

“Wait –…”

Both Five and I had spoken at the same time. We glanced at each other and he nodded. I said, “We thought we would be working together.”

“Why did you think that?” She clasped her hands together. “It was never stated and never put forward as a condition.”

She turned on her heel and marched back out into the hall. It left a forlorn moment to be drawn out between Five and I in which neither of us knew what should be said or done. We could not let her win nor could we think we held too much power over her. So, I reached out and pulled his hand from his pocket to squeeze it, just once.

“We’ll meet up later,” I said. “Can’t keep us apart forever.”

He smiled. It was faint and full of resignation and gone before the Handler could turn and spot it. He was not willing to give her anything more than what she had already taken from us.

Theodore shuffled into the hall, following them. I stood beside him. He watched the Handler and Five disappear, turning a corner. It was hard not to marvel at his height. He had peeled back the loupe. He was awkward, hulking in his size.

Theodore let out a small breath, one I had not known he was holding in until his tall body sagged and he relaxed against the wall. He looked down at me and it was a lot like how it felt with Luther, craning my neck to see him.

“There are tea-breaks,” he said gently. “Lunches, too. Oh – sometimes people retire and we have parties and cake and – and I guess you’ll be able to see each other then.”

He smiled and I decided his was much nicer than the Handler’s. He did not need to duck his head to walk back into the room, which explained the size of the door. I looked down that hall, lingering on the spot where Five had last been, before I turned around, intending to follow Theodore. But I noticed the plaque overhead the door, which glinted bronze and dull.

It read: THE WATCHROOM.

▬

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i didn't put it in the top note so as to avoid spoiling stuff, but on a rewatch of the episodes involved in this chapter, i think there might be a continuity error or i'm just missing something. luther and diego go to find five, find his van and figure out hes at argyle library - but five goes to meritech, it blows up and THEN he goes to the library. so he got drunk and beat them to the library that fast?? did i miss something
> 
> anyways i'm teasing a lot of stuff here. astrid's powers, pruitt's role, some resolution for the end of the story. also the end will involve time travel and i'm so stuck wondering if my resolution makes sense logically 
> 
> yes people i am wondering about logic in an UA fic with time travel elements i can't help it 
> 
> hope you all have a lovely valentine's day. 💗💗 x

**Author's Note:**

> as i mentioned before, i cant promise the next time ill update very quickly bc i am going to really take my time (i say, posting sooner than i had ever imagined last week)
> 
> i was going to hold off on uploading this but i felt happy with it (i know, finally happy with something!) and i can only hope you all felt the same. with a little bit of uncertainty in astrid's memories and perception...poor astrid...i am so cruel... 
> 
> thank you guys for all your support. x


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